Twitter

If you missed Matrix of Intimacy, Part 1 you may want to read it.

So. We're all matrices of likes and dislikes, and with social media this is more apparent since we have interactions with more people than we would have without the Internet - geography is now less of a factor. Since I couldn't afford the services of Mondolithic Studios, I'm stuck with my riveting stick figures on the left. A computer might interpret how we look to each other as matrices of likes and dislikes - but we humans don't. Maybe we should.

We know what we like. We know what we don't like. Sometimes what we don't like becomes something we do like. Sometimes things we do like become things we don't. Some people are more consistent with their likes and dislikes than others. When you boil it all down to the primordial stew of the collective intelligence of a single creature, we're a pretty dysfunctional group of cells. Picture a body of cells where nerves connect cells in other parts of the body. We'd call that a nervous system. But lets draw that down again back to 2 people.

The things that interest us change. The things that interest us change in priority. It could be argued that introverts might change the people around them as their own interests change and that extroverts might change their interests as those of people around them change.

Change, though, is constant. What we perceive as noise isn't always constant. It changes, too.

Going down into finer detail, in social media, we get to the tags that people use as well as the tags that interest them. Hidden within the tags people use, we get into the things that people use certain tags for.

The Internet is flooded with the autobiographies of primates with blow by blow commentary in the hope that someone, somewhere will think that the brushing of their teeth is noteworthy. So we get noise. That noise is also tagged with all manner of tags. Some, like #YOLO on Twitter, is pretty self-contained and can be easily ignored. Some creeps into all manner of things, from politics to social media to rocket science to lipstick colors.

But some noise isn't noise. Sometimes it's an echo of something we've already seen. If you haven't seen a meme fly by a week after you posted it, you haven't been on the Internet very long.

One person's noise is another person's music. Ask any parent and teenager.

Thus, we get different kinds of noise:

• Matrix mismatches: When people you might otherwise like post a bunch of stuff you're not really interested in. We've all seen it on Facebook, Twitter or wherever else.
• Repetitive: When someone finds that meme from last year for the first time and feels an ovewhelming urge to put on their Indiana Jones hat and share their archaeological discovery to the world.
• Lack of relevancy: Simply put, inappropriate tagging.
• Self-Absorbed: You know. The 'it-is-all-about-me-and-my-cat-and-what-my-grandkids-did-last-summer' folks. To some extent everyone is self-absorbed, but some people make it more of an artform than others.
• Promoted Posts: Where someone pays to own a keyword or tag, as in Google Ads or promoted posts, when you care less than the poo-flinging monkeys at the zoo.

What social networks haven't figured out how to do is attenuate the noise - and if someone actually sat down and thought about it, it's really not tough.

Here's a hint. And it can be done.

To be done well, though.... that's the challenge.

I've been playing a lot with the concepts and implementations of tags because they are probably one of the most powerful tools we have for finding content that we still don't use that much. This is based largely on the Matrix of Intimacy (first mention), where I've been looking at ways to automate what we get from who - and how to go about it. I'll write more on the Matrix of Intimacy concept later since I'm still fleshing it out...

On the surface it seemed like tags would be a great way to do this. This is a 'thinking out loud' post on them.

Just about anyone who has used blogs is well aware of the tag cloud and how well it can highlight certain keywords (tags) by the way in which they are used. For example, the image on the left¹ shows a tag cloud - where 'Social Computing' and 'Social Media' immediately leap out because of their size. This size is relative to the amount of times the tag is used in a given period of time (frequency).

What is neat about the tag cloud is that it is a de facto matrix. A cloud, as the one pictured, is basically a matrix of keywords that are made pretty and that, rather than looking mathematical (when they are!)

The math behind it isn't that complicated. It easily demonstrates a bias toward certain keywords when used and, to an observer, may reinforce the bias by showcasing the more frequently used tags as larger.

But it doesn't tell us that much other than which keywords are used most. It doesn't tell us, for example, which tags are used together the most frequently. It also doesn't tell us much about the articles themselves. Even worse, and it has nothing to do with the image here, it doesn't tell us how many times a tag was used because it was popular so that the article would be read.

That's the trouble with tag clouds. Don't get me wrong - this particular example that I picked off of Google is very aesthetically pleasing and (at least I think so) puts things in perspective in the context it was intended - but tag clouds on websites typically don't have contexts other than the site that they are on. They don't show the relationships between topics other than the common site.

This has bugged me for years; in fact it's the reason why I no longer have a tag cloud on this site. Of course, they are easy to do, but are they useful?

If you want to see the strengths of tags, is the frequency of their usage the most important? Is it how many times something was read? Is it about geographical distribution of the readers? Is it how many times it has been referenced, and by whom? And what if, like a dusty old book in a library, they are hidden gems that no one has discovered - how does one go about discovering them?

Search Engines index content along these lines, and at least at one point (perhaps still, the second it gets figured out it has to change)  the tags used would be linked to pages associated with that tag on a site - thus artificially boosting the tag/keyword when searched for on the search engine. Of course, the algorithms of search engines only use this as part of weighting their results (because what they produce from a search is really a weighted list), but it has an impact. What search engines also do is search the content itself for keywords, phrases and other things that people may search for. Because of this, if you wanted to search for content related to Social Computing AND Facebook, you'd have a better chance of finding what you want through a search engine like Google than on a site.

In fact, sites with their own search for content (like this one), the content is indexed and allow people to search for content based on similar things.

So, why are tags important? Tags get content categorized at a meta-level, and for tags to be useful they have to be created properly. To be even more useful, they have to be used in ways more akin to search engines - though an argument would be that search engines replace the need for tags (and tags reinforce search engine results).

But between individuals, how could tags be used for better communication, both decreasing the amount of noise in communication (such as suffering a person's political posts on a social network when you only want their other stuff?). Not only that, how can tags better be used to find content more conducive to the person searching? All too often these questions are asked reversed - as in how to get the content to the most people. The real questions should revolve around getting the right content to the right people.

¹Courtesy daniel_iversen's flickr photostream and made available with this Creative Commons License. It's used here only as an example of a tag cloud and the

Reflecting on some of the phone interviews, talks with headhunters and constantly searching for jobs and contracts - for the longest period of no work I have had (oh look! A resume!), I've seen all manner of software development jobs float by in the ether. Some I shoot flares at, some I don't, but I see almost all of them through a combination of RSS feeds, email updates and a helpful network of friends. And, as one does after looking without finding, one starts reflecting.

Then I ran across this quote on Facebook:

"While I have not lost faith in its potentialities, my views have changed since. War can not be avoided until the physical cause for its recurrence is removed and this, in the last analysis, is the vast extent of the planet on which we live. Only though annihilation of distance in every respect, as the conveyance of intelligence, transport of passengers and supplies and transmission of energy will conditions be brought about some day, insuring permanency of friendly relations. What we now want most is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth and the elimination of that fanatic devotion to exalted ideals of national egoism and pride, which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife. No league or parliamentary act of any kind will ever prevent such a calamity. These are only new devices for putting the weak at the mercy of the strong." - Chapter 6, My Inventions, Nikola Tesla (1919)

There's no way Tesla could have predicted the modern Internet, but he had this crazy idea that the world would be a better place if only we could communicate across large distances. Almost 100 years later, it's an odd naiveté (or romantic idealism) that some of us cling to. Of course, technology has promised many things across the decades.

The Old World

Back in the 1980s, when I first started my intimate relationship with feral computers, technology was promising simplicity. At some point in the last few decades that changed somewhere, probably when I was compiling some code or debugging some source code. The big thing in the 1980s was the paperless office which, as much as I could over the years, I have attempted to have. Signed contracts still necessitate a printer and scanner.

Visicalc came along. Accountants everywhere were very pleased.

Sneaker nets, where we ran around with magnetic media (we did use cassettes and reel-to-reel devices for a while), were slowly morphed into networks. Computers began sharing information across networks. Thanks in part to the Carterfone, where some guy sold his ranch to beat AT&T's monopoly of connecting devices to the phone system, networks grew even further as modems became more and more popular. For debugging purposes the modems had speakers where you could hear the handshake (play this in the office and see what happens!). Again, the promise of paperless offices. Again, there was a promise that we would spend less time being more productive.

The Internet was a natural evolution of networks - a really big network where we could communicate and, yes, share code - though sharing code became more and more of an issue of copyright - and where The Bulletin Board Systems of yesteryear became even more viable for so many. Web browsers, email, the web browser wars - which have managed to screw up web development to this day - and websites, where you could show off your HTML skills. Awesome stuff. In seemingly unrelated news, the Berlin Wall came down - changing economies even more. The Internet became the beast of burden for the Dot Com blowout. Not only could you spend less time doing more, you could become more visible and even useful with websites. Everyone who could afford Internet access could get their 15 megabytes of fame.

Microsoft Frontpage came out and even people who didn't know HTML could create websites. This Dark Age of the Internet was quickly remedied with weblog software that quickly morphed into blog software, then Content Management Systems. Free Software and Open Source leveled the playing field as only Free Software and Open Source could. They diverged. Linux made servers more cost effective, and LAMP servers, to this day, are as common to the Internet as salt and pepper are in kitchens - not always used but always available.

Mobile technologies, wireless, 3G, 4G (coming soon, nG!). Programmers and technologists everywhere have been working on what we create now - and a few of us got to see it from the angle I just wrote about. In doing so, when I look on social networks about how our communication has improved, I'm not sure that Tesla took into account the human condition. We gravitate to those like us and on the Internet, through social media and social networks, we do exactly that. Twitter hashtags and who our 'friends' are determine what we read and, since we read what we like to read, we reinforce our opinions on just about everything.

We're still not paperless and I'm not sure that we could claim that we're more productive. Technology still hasn't really met many of the dreams of the 1980s - or at least made them commonplace - and it seems, overall, we have more and more things to spend time on. But word processors do the same things, though they are formatted more nicely. We can process more data - if we have access to it and can trust it. Computer programming has gone from coding from basics to integrating libraries of code which has created more flavors and also more obsolete software as it becomes harder and harder to find developers that can support them.

I write all of this because those dreams of the 1980s shouldn't be nostalgic. By now they should be real. Some people would say that our technology has outstripped our humanity - I used to - but I'm not sure that this is true. We haven't really harnessed it yet. I

n the job searches, I've seen companies looking for such a broad range of programming related things that there's no clear path to what will land a job; one group wants Python, another group wants Javascript, someone wants a firmware developer, another group wants to support some archaic proprietary CMS that should probably be taken quietly outside and shot. Everyone's off going in different directions and it seems like, overall, that overall technology isn't really being harnessed to improve society as much as it is to meet specific needs created by technology.

And that leads to the question: What are the modern promises of technology? Where are we going?

Tesla had that crazy idea about 100 years ago...