How can we combine the power of Web networks with networks resulting from other human activity? Accomplishing this goal represents knowledge management’s key challenge and opportunity.

This article by Ravi Kumar, Prabhakar Raghavan, and others appears in the November 2002 issue of IEEE _Computer_ magazine. [Requires subscription for full text.]

The Web and Social Networks

The 13th Annual Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy will begin on April 1 and run through April 4, 2003 in New York City. The meeting will be held at The New Yorker Hotel, in the shadow of the Empire State Building.

Submit your proposal today for a tutorial, plenary session, workshop, technical demonstration, or BOF. November 15 is the cut-off date, so act now.

CFP 2003

Tom: Howard Rheingold is now running a weblog about Smart Mobs.

(Back in July, I logged www.rheingold.com/smartmobs/, which is now being forwarded to smartmobs.com. They're the same site.)

Howard is doing a book tour -- he has five days of events planned in SF, and one day each in a number of other cities, including Boston, DC, and LA. (Howard will also be attending Pop!Tech, which I logged a few months ago.)

Smart Mobs - The Next Social Revolution

I mentioned this book back in June. It's now for sale, online or at your favorite local bookstore. (You can search for "Lovink" to retrieve my earlier entry.)

According to media critic Geert Lovink, the Internet is being closed off by corporations and governments intent on creating a business and information environment free of dissent. Calling himself a radical media pragmatist, Lovink envisions an Internet culture that goes beyond the engineering culture that spawned it to bring humanities, user groups, social movements, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), artists, and cultural critics into the core of Internet development.

In Dark Fiber, Lovink combines aesthetic and ethical concerns and issues of navigation and usability without ever losing sight of the cultural and economic agendas of those who control hardware, software, content, design, and delivery.

Dark Fiber : Tracking Critical Internet Culture

In the end, the key to creating effective Internet communications is understanding that it's not about the technology. It's about connecting people to other people... and facilitating further connections.

Connect the dots and win!

It's Not About the Technology

Swarming is a classic example of how once-isolated individuals are discovering a new way to organize order out of chaos, without guidance. It reverses the idea that geography, in an Internet age, has become irrelevant -- the whole point is to bring people together in one location for face-to-face contact. Swarming is also leading to such wondrous social developments as "time-softening," "cell dancing," "life skittering," "posse pinging," "drunk dialing," and "smart mobs."

Cell Biology

Howard Rheingold has a new book coming out in October. (Amazon claims it will be November.) Included here is Howard's summary of the concept. There are links to a recent NYT article and a longer article at Edge.org. Also included is the table of contents for the new book. There is an entire chapter on "the evolution of reputation."

Smart mobs emerge when communication and computing technologies amplify human talents for cooperation. The impacts of smart mob technology already appear to be both beneficial and destructive.

The people who make up smart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible ...

Media cartels and government agencies are seeking to reimpose the regime of the broadcast era. Are the populations of tomorrow going to be users or consumers?

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, by Howard Rheingold

Sometimes we need to listen to people who have bad reputations. Often they are the critics, the people with a talent for seeing flaws and problems none of us want to face. Communities can't thrive if they never answer to the least reputable of their members. So, for now I'm waiting for a new community system, one whose wisdom will destroy reputations and replace them with something more meaningful. "

Annalee Newitz is waiting for MemeStreams.

SF Guardian on current 'Reputation Systems' (SIC)

This is a report published by the European Parliament after the burst of the late 1990s economic bubble. Included below are excerpts from the preface and executive summary.

If market take-up is a general problem for the development of the Information Society, the specific reasons and bottlenecks need to be addressed. ... The study concentrates on access, standards, privacy, and the convergence of finance and communications networks and systems.

Access problems have been at the root of regulatory policy since the early days ... The process of market liberalisation is a continuous one, and it is difficult to dispel the impression that no sooner is one bottleneck solved than another appears. The report therefore sets about trying to discover where bottlenecks to competition are likely to occur as new economy services develop beyond their basic levels.

In cases where the take-up of electronic business has been slower than expected, one of the major reasons has been the lack of trust and confidence that citizens have ...

Concerns regarding privacy are, according to this study at least, well-founded. The chapter on privacy is frankly disturbing, and policy measures will be needed to deal with emerging and future threats.

In tomorrow's Information Society, an increasingly wide range of human characteristics will find themselves reflected in some kind of electronic equivalent. A major hypothesis of this study is that the increasing weight of the electronic expression of those characteristics will lead to new indicators of privacy. Today's determinants of privacy will be replaced by tomorrow's virtual characteristics expressed in terms of a host of personal data. Just as information technology transformed business processes, and its partnership with communications technologies is now transforming commercial processes, the treatment of personal information is undergoing similar radical change and transformation under the influence of these same technologies.

Future Bottlenecks in the Information Society [PDF]

From this working paper by the Center for Strategic and International Studies:

The US must plan its Homeland defense policies and programs for a future in which there is no way to predict the weapon that will be used or the method chosen to deliver a weapon which can range from a small suicide attack by an American citizen to the covert delivery of a nuclear weapon by a foreign state. There is no reason the US should assume that some convenient Gaussian curve or standard deviation will make small or medium level attacks a higher priority over time than more lethal forms.

Any structured intellectual approach to describing this situation -- and planning for it -- is so uncertain that a valid structure can only be developed as an exercise in complexity or "chaos" theory.

I, however, would like you to think about the biological threat in more mundane terms. I am going to suggest that you think about biological warfare in terms of a TV show called "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," that you think about the world of biological weapons in terms of the "Buffy Paradigm," and that you think about many of the problems in the proposed solutions as part of the "Buffy Syndrome."

Finally! All those hours of research are beginning to pay off!

Biological Warfare and the 'Buffy Paradigm' [PDF]