SilverBulleits

More Thinking Inside the (White) Box

As one who had mixed feelings about both candidates last fall, it's important I think to acknowledge budding accomplishments as I see them.  And, while I still don't subscribe to all of the new Administration's priorities, no one can question the Obama team's extraordinary fidelity to their platform and campaign promises as well as their pragmatic flexibility in pursuing them.

Yet another remarkable aspect of the Obama crowd is the energy and intelligence that they seem to be bringing to the job.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of spending some time with one of them: Associate Director, White House Office of Public Engagement--Matt Flavin.  Matt it seems is working hard to find ways to materially help "wounded warriors" and Veterans generally. And, I was of course thrilled to have an opportunity to present our Health over IP (HoIP) platform for consideration.

`more on HoIP in a future post...

One of Matt's questions involves a familiar concern over the Quality and reliability of Web 2.0 in general and UGC in particular.  Specifically, he asked, how much vetting could a service like HoIP have--i.e., one that relies upon end-users to help motivate and inform other end-users?

Not an easy question; and there are a lot of ways to address it (e.g., as HoIP does). But, in the end the answer lies in how much you want to Trust your users.  And, as Jeff Jarvis eloquently points out, the evidence is clear that Volume clearly flows to those [web services] that do.  And,with Volume comes "vetting", and with that comes Trust and Security.

I'm wondering, therefore, if the 3D orthogonal relationship (that I described previously a the "Bachman Factor") may be expanded further? Specifically, I'm wondering if Volume and Quality may be directly linked as well?  In other words, as Wikipedia and other sites have proved, the Wisdom Of Crowds is real!  The more people actively intreracting on a topic seems, uneringly,...unerring.

So, I suppose, the faux-math and accompanying illustration  may be edited as follows... What do you think?

Thinking INSIDE The Box

I've been thinking a lot lately about the Semantic Web in general and the pinnacle of its various protocols in particular--i.e., Trust.  Call it a blinding flash of the obvious, but it occurs to me that "trust" is one of those often re-licensed words that, accordingly, means a lot of different things: things that can only be fully defined within a specific context.

But, rather than digress further into the semantics of trust here, I was struck by another, truly blinding, insight as I read through Jeff Jarvis' excellent new book What Would Google Do? 

http://www.amazon.com/What-Would-Google-Jeff-Jarvis/dp/0061709719/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242001215&sr=8-1

Specifically, Mr. Jarvis notes that, in the new Web world, Control drives Trust; in other words, participatory Web 2.0 types tend to flock to sites that seem to trust them (by yielding as much control as possible) and they flee from the rest.

This idea then completed another neural circuit in my limited-capacity brain, as it reminded me of a recent conversation with "the father of healthcare consumerism"--Ron Bachman

http://www.healthcarevisions.net/page/page/2641658.htm

And, as Ron pointed out, the inverse relationship between Trust and Security (i.e., the less secure we feel, the more likely we are to trust any leader that can convincingly promise to restore it) I suggested that there's orthogonal relationship here to control as well! That is, the same anxious individual will yield control (and freedom) as well. But, by the same token, an expansion of trust begets an expansion in both security and perceived control!

Thus, the counter-intuitive demi-discovery here (at least for me) is that effective web volume can be exponentially expanded (i.e., the sum of all three dimensions depicted below) with each incremental expansion of any!

I'll call it the "Bachman factor."  Think about it...and, drop a comment if you'd like

 

The Semi-Final Cut (on Web 3.0)

First, I'd like to thank everyone that sent comments; I was a bit surprised that most came off-line and/or by e-mail.  Some seemed to feel that the content was (or should be) a little too proprietary (to be published upon a publicly-accessible BLOG); others, I suspect, felt that their input may have come off a  little too critical.

For my own part, I was a bit taken aback by how some of the very same passages that some loved others hated; several suggested different directions altogether! For example, several folks would have liked a little more on more conventional Web 3.0 connotations (e.g. Semantic Web, Cloud Computing, etc) but others felt that that was a waste of space and we should have spent all our time on the "conflating communities" notion.

So, in the end, the paper hasn't changed that much; and, we'd welcome more input before putting a final draft of it on the shelf. PLEASE keep the "comments" (and e-mails) coming.

Anyway, here it is...

Download Web 3.0 D2.1comp

p.s., If you're not inclined to read through the whole paper again, you may want to turn to the last page "Idea In Brief"

Download The Web 3.0 Idea In Brief2