End Homographophobia now

There is a dangerous prejudice afoot in the technical world - Homographophobia. Those who suffer from it call for segregation, to avoid the miscegenation of meaning - they want to ensure that their Humpty-Dumpty definitions are not polluted by sharing with others. But they are wrong. We are all imperfectly multilingual, we all have our own internal associations for any given word, but we can only communicate through overlapping meanings with some degree of sharing of concepts.

So we should eschew namespaces and hierarchies as they are just solipsistic security blankets, and embrace the overlapping ambiguity of using words as tags, as Roschian prototypes and as puns. Homophonophobia is a similar affliction, yet homophones give rise to so much entertainment and jollity, as the "four candles" sketch shows:

Social networks - what's the Object-ive?

One way of thinking about social networks is through "social objects" - the cultural touchstones and shared ideas that we use to bridge our Dunbar-constrained networks to broader communities. We all do this - use some shared object as a point of conversational reference. Here in the US it tends to be sports teams activities; in the UK there's always the weather to fall back on. (This fails in California because it's too predictable - when I came here in 1998 it took me a while to realise that saying "beautiful day again" was like saying "I see gravity's still working" to Californians).

Talking about social objects is nothing new - Jyri discussed them at length back in 2005, and danah dissected Friendster's suicide in 2006 when they killed off the Fakesters (user profiles that represented social objects like "Jack Daniels" and "Burning Man").

Where I find the 'Dunbar number' idea falls down is that social network connections, like so many other human-made things, are power-law distributed. The small number of highly-connected entities that fulfil the role of social objects are sometimes people. If you think about celebrities, they clearly fit- being able to discuss Brad and Jen and Angelina's latest shenanigans binds you in, and shows like American Idol are designed to draw on this need, giving the Faustian bargain of fame in exchange for objectification.

Different social network services can be distinguished through the different kinds of object that lead to their success. Friendster's expulsion of Fakesters, and later attempts to use TV characters is one example; MySpace's embrace of independent bands and FaceBook's initial use of Universities as touchstones help explain their divergence. LinkedIn has Companies as their touchstone, Orkut has it's communities, which are often used as badges for the users to express their identity. Suicide Girls is a blog network focused around models-as-objects, last.fm uses songs and bands, Flickr uses photos, Dopplr uses places.

Looked at in this way, James Hong's attempt to change the core objects of HotOrNot from pictures of strangers to pictoral self-tags he calls "Stylepix" seems an interesting experiment.

Making sense of the different object graphs and how they interact with the social graphs in these overlapping sites will keep lots more researchers busy, I'm sure.

B-roll is the new a-hole

Editing shows respect. Steve Gillmor has put up his new video podcast Bad Sinatra which is him unedited wandering around and chatting to people. Now, I like Steve, and enjoy having rambling conversations with him about things, but I don't think it works as video. With video, as with audio, editing shows respect for your audience. To do a truly live or as-live show, like the splendid In Our Time, you need to plan it out in advance and choreograph it. Otherwise, you need to edit. Carefully.

If you want to hear a perfectly edited podcast, listen to Radiolab. I spend 90 minutes a day cycling and listening to my iPod, which is exactly the use case for podcasting I explained to the BBC a few years back. Now that shows of this quality are there to be downloaded regularly, my tolerance for self-indulgent rambling podcasts like bad voicemail messages is way down.

I made this point way back at the dawn of podcasting , when Chris Lydon's well-edited interviews inspired us to download them to our iPods. In the online world we are each others' media, as we mediate what is worth reading for each other through our blogs and link streams. This too, is a form of editing, and doing it shows respect for each other. Steve, tighten it up into something worth watching. My children know how to do it.