Metcalfe's law

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Metcalfe's law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system (n²). First formulated by Robert Metcalfe in regard to Ethernet, Metcalfe's law explains many of the network effects of communication technologies and networks such as the Internet, social networking, and the World Wide Web. It is related to the fact that the number of unique connections in a network of a number of nodes (n) can be expressed mathematically as n(n-1)/2, which follows n² asymptotically.

The law has often been illustrated using the example of fax machines: a single fax machine is useless, but the value of every fax machine increases with the total number of fax machines inthe network, because the total number of people with whom each user may send and receive documents increases. [It can also be argued that the FIRST person to buy a Fax machine was an idiot as there was no other bugger around to fax to]

In fact, Metcalfe's law measures the potential number of contacts, i.e. the technological side of a network. However the social utility of a network depends upon the number of nodes in contact. For instance, if Chinese and Non-Chinese users don't understand each other, the utility of a network of users that speak the other language is at zero, and the law has to be calculated for the two networks separately.

Citizens Media and Web 3.0

Bloggers and Mash, New Scientist mag 15 Mar 08

When everybody can be a journalist or a film maker, what happens to the media?... Were finding out right now says Dan Gilmour.

August 2007 the I-35 Bridge across the Mississippi river in Minneapolis collapses. December 2004 the Boxing Day Tsunami sweeps around the Pacific Rim. London Bus bombs etc. Events like these trip the Global Media into a reporting frenzy. Reporting of such events these days goes well beyond the gaggle of newspaper, radio and TV reporters. Scores of non-journalistscreating content [photos, videos etc] and sharing it across the globe and with large media organisations such as reuters, BBC, ABC and so forth. also join in

This phenomenon goes by many names but the one I prefer is Citizens Media. People who used to consume media now create it, publish it and comment on it. More than 100 Million people have started blogs; millions more publish video and pictures on the web, write and edit Wikipedia entries, create Mashups, post comments on mainstream media sites and so on.

As digital gear becomes more powerful, ubiquitous and affordable, the tools of media creation are increasingly in everyone’s hands. [new-media]Consumers are becoming creators. Creators are becoming collaborators. People talk about the ‘read-write web’. “The most important constituency of Journalism is what I like to call the former audience, the folk who once passively consumed media but can now actively participate in its creation”. So this is not only just passively reading news on the web, but commenting on it via blogs, focus groups etc. This [real-time] interaction is the difference as we move from exposure to media to interaction with media.

"The tools of citizens journalism:
Blogs
The most prominent feature of the read-write web is blogging. 10's of millions of people have started these online journals, assisted by free and easy to use online tools such as Google's Blogger. [IAD platform of choice for Cert 1 IT students]. To answer a common question: Most blogs are not journalism, and some are. The best journalistic blogs have appeared in niche areas, such as technology, and have won large audiences coveted by advertisers" The important thing to remeber is that blogs are only as useful as their comments. It's a collaborative, peer reviewed space: This aint about protecting your privacy as much as publishing your passions: get as many folk to link/comment as possible. [see metcalf's law]
Media Sharing
The likes of Flikr and youtube have heralded a revolution in visual media. They have given everybody easy-to-use, low cost venues to publish their creations.
Digital Images
Digital still and video camera are nearly ubiquitous, but the real shift is in the migration of the camera to the mobile phone. With the connection of phones to networks, they have become powerful tools for sharing what we see. Most of the canonical images of the 2005 London bombings were taken by amateurs, including the famous grainy, green tinged image of a man exiting from a smoky underground train with a cloth over his mouth.
Mashups
Mashups take data or services from more than one place and combine them. Online software such as "Wayfaring" makes them easy to create. One notable mashup is the Tinisian prison map project which mashes together maps and information from political activists to highlight human rights issues. Another kind of mashup combines media; one of the most popular pieces of political satire is a brilliantly edited mashup by Sweedish film maker Johan Soderberg showing GW Bush and Tony Blair singing "Endless Love" to one another.
RSS
Standing for Really Simple Syndication, RSS is a file format that allows you to subscribe to many different "feeds" such as blogs and news and have them delivered to your aggregator on your computer or phone. Blogging software automatically converts blogs into RSS to make them easily accessible by others.
Wiki's
The most famous "User generated" site is Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that now has more than 2 million articles in English. Wikis can be written and edited by anyone, and when they work well they become authoritative repositories of shared knowledge.
For the radio podcast excerpts below:
You need the shockwave flash plugin to cop an ear on this. Anywho, the top selection is a researcher explaining how he would like ABC radio national to open up their media archives. Its gonna happen.
The second one is a great Podcast excerpt from ABCrn's Media Report. Basically talking about the shift in attitudes and copy that Pommie Journo's are now affording we the Oz public. No longer are we all called Bruce, etc, actually seems there's more of an appreciation about just how lucky this country is. So, a big thing in the Pommie gutter press [News of the World, Daily Express etc], and the high end [Guardian, Time etc] is Oz animal stories, from Steve Irwin to errant kangaroos. The second story is about 2 erstwhile pomms on a cricket tour of Oz. On the way from one test to another they run over and stun a kangaroo, have a listen, its a hoot.

Propriocentrics: Creating tech marvels out of a $50 Wii Remote

Convergence widgets
I see the location sensing component of the Wii remote as one of the functions of our future palm sized media players; PDA/3G/GPS/IP/WiFi/TV.

A PDA with the graphics performance delivered by the chip architecture in the Sony Playstation Portable [PSP], the user interface and connectivity of the iPhone, the personal location sensing capacity of a Nintendo Wii type remote and the Geo location sensing that GPS and 3G bring, will enable a unit with these bundled attributes ready to seamlessly absorb what is now technically available to be stremed.

Sony PSP have released a Linux based programmable interface so that Astronomers, Robotocists, climate modellers etc can pout their unit to other tasks.
iPhone has already been cracked and again is being used for unintended purposes, though Apple are slower to jump onto the open source collaborative model. Nintendo Wii [largest gaming unit sales in the US above Xbox and Playstation] seem likely to embrace the 'emergent consequences' of whatever uses the Wii remote will be put to. [Science, Gaming, Location Specific-On demand Content services]
The great thing about Second Life is that it is easy to conceptualise and model how such 'live connectivity aides' work for our personal avatar, and by extension, how we of the meat space can leverage our reality via them.