That is all.

Al Muniz has been doing some very good work on characterizing the communities that form around brands. Newton or old Saab owners for example. I like his work. He’s careful about definition of terms; like community. For example Al’s work is where I lifted the three element model of community: common cause, common rituals, common aid. The work of this kind is also interesting because it’s one of the few places where careful work is getting done on the muddy ground between private goods and public goods.

But today let me strongly urge that you go read this excellent posting over at Many-to-Many which
critiques the ethics of BzzAgents, I think it was written by Kevin Marks. BzzAgents sells the labor of brand community members to the firms that own the brand.

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There is a well-known phenomenon of cognitive dissonance in employment, where if you pay people less to do work, they are more committed to it, as they justify it to themselves in other terms. Many media companies run on young and hungry interns who do lots of work for free, while their managers are well-rewarded. The graduate student/professor relationship is often characterised in these terms too. Balter’s success in BzzAgent is in refining this model to the point where he gets paid well by corporations, and his agents are doing it for their own reasons

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Conversely, Bzzagents is effectively, if not always explicitly, encouraging people to play mind games with their social contacts, to serve a central agenda
….

Welcome to the moral mazes which is work design.

Eve Maler brings our attention to Mark Liberman seeking a name for a particular class of communication …

where you say something not because you mean it, exactly, but because it gives you a chance to use a word or phrase you’ve been saving up

I thought the word for that was blogging. The stuff in our heads is always struggling to get out. It’s willing to escape using whatever media is available.

This morning’s New York Time’s article on blogging at Los Alamos marks an interesting exception to their usual coverage of blogging.

One arch-typical dialectic that get’s rolled out when discussing blogs is little guys v.s. big institutions (David and Gollith, Amatures v.s. Proffesionals, nutty cranks v.s. the competent). This article is no exception. The big guy is the boss at Los Alamos and the little guys are the staff .

The whole “are blogger’s journalists” thread is one varaition of this big/little dialectic. I find that question bizzare. It took me a long time to understand it’s roots. The real source of that question is the fear of the media proffesional. When they write on blogging, they have a strange tendency to volunteer to play the role of the giant in Jack and Beanstalk. Bloggers, of course, are cast in the role of Jack.

This article is an exception. It doesn’t take the bait. A step in the right direction. Though, if you ask me, the whole big/little dialectic is a bit of a rat hole. Who’s selling the beans? Who owns the beanstalk? Lots of other interesting questions.

Traffic on my sites is highly skewed. Hour by hour I don’t get much traffic; but just occationally a flash-crowd shows up at my door. The distribution would be power-law; except I truncate them. By the way; “truncate the flash-crowd” is a nice way to say the machine crashes. Don’t say “Damn the machine crashed!” instead you say “Oh boy! A flash crowd!”

I’d get around 50% more traffic if I could deal with the flash-crowds successfully. But I’m a cheap bastard and I’m not willing to buy a bigger pipe, a bigger web server, and spend the time to stress test my site regularly to assure it can deal with these very rare very huge bursts of traffic.

Last time the flash crowd showed up I rebooted the poor machine and used the Coral Distribution Network to solve the problem. Coral’s cool. It’s research project built on the planet net distributed computing research platform. So they let people use it for free. Which is very nice of them; though it makes me feel like a freeloader.

That all leads to two desires (or ideas).

First off I wish I had a means to configure my web server so it would automatically shed load to Coral when the flash crowd show up. I’d prefer not freeload during the 95% of the time when my site is doing it’s usual thing out on the heavy tail of the power-law distribution. This might be easy with one of the Apache modules that does load monitoring and shaping; but I haven’t found the right mix of stuff to make it easy for me to set up.

Secondly, it would be way cool to architect a means that sites with similar load distributions could form cooperative peering relationships and then when one of them get’s struck by a flash crowd the other members of the consortium would step up to deal. This one would make a sweet topic for somebodies doctoral thesis (particularly the design of the goverance and it’s enforcement). Or, the other kind of somebody could ‘just’ would make a weekend hack our of these two ideas.

Ok, I admit it, I’m trying to bait the lazy web here. I forecast sunny weather!

I’m having a lot of fun over at my 2nd blog: Gibbon’s Garage.

Intelliseek’s BlogPulse is cool

No harm in making my field notebooks public as I watch the Grease Monkies cavort in the wild.

Gibbon’s Garage

… a 40% to 99% chance that there will be at least one more fatal event murder …

Here’s a odd thought.

Google presumably works to place ads which maximize click thrus.

Most traffic to my old pages are from google searches.

See, the weird incentive?

They control the whole audience experiance with the exception only of what’s on my page. What makes a good page in this situation? A page that bounces the user quickly thru and into the ads. Short pages are good. Pages with few distracting links. Pages that leave the user hungry.

I think this explains why some of my pages seem to have ads on them that appear slightly off from the actual content. I suspect their ad placement AI has noticed that such ads attract users who got sent to these pages by mistake.

Bugs that lower search engine result quality create opportunities for the Ad engine.

It’s like the old slightly paranoid joke about why ads are more entertaining than the TV shows.