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John Tierney reviews Jaron Lanier's brand new book – You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto – in yesterday's New York Times. I ordered it today. I have to admit I'm pretty wary of any new book with the word "Manifesto" in the title. Seems awfully cocky to me. Reading Tierney's review, I suspect Lanier's book will be provocative, but I suspect I'll disagree with most of it. Why would Lanier want to throw in with folks like Andrew Keen and Jonathan Zittrain, seemingly trying to make a buck or a headline by pointing out the horrible things that the internet will lead us to? Let's fight the technological determinist tendency to argue that the internet is a great beast that has us in its grips and is marching us back to its lair.

I'm going to reserve judgment until I read the thing, although I admit it's hard. People do not seem very tolerant of this tumultuous (but exciting!) period in which we're trying to figure out the whole always-on, massive collaboration, cloud computing, social norm changing thing that's going on. I for one am content to give it time.

First, there's a paper by Mor Naaman, Jeffrey Boase, Chih-Hui Lai called "Is it Really About Me? Message Content in Social
Awareness Streams" (PDF). Among a variety of interesting and nuanced findings, the authors show evidence that about 80% of Twitter users are "meformers" – people whose Tweets are mostly about themselves. Only 20% were in the "informer" category – people who share information about other topics.

Surprisingly, TechCrunch has lately been the source of seemingly high quality data about Twitter. In addition to Geoff Cook's great guest post on Why Teens Don't Tweet, back in October Robert Moore posted a huge amount of data and longitudinal analysis.

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And, just today, TechCrunch has news from Comscore that Twitter's growth has basically flattened out for both international and US users, this despite a recent push of new features and new languages. In September I predicted the demise of Twitter, and this seems to be the first stage. 2009 was definitely their year – arguably no technology was more popular, more widely talked about than Twitter was this year. 2010 will be the year of soul searching for Twitter, where the new-ness wears off, new features don't gain the expected traction, and the company continues to look for a reliable business model. If Twitter has a big future, it's going to be as a messaging platform that underlies more interesting services.

I like what DARPA is thinking here. We know that internet-based tools have helped people coordinate massive jobs on the fly. The best recent examples of collective efforts enabled by the internet were the searches for Jim Gray's lost sailboat and Steve Fosset's downed plane. Unfortunately, neither search turned up anything. Both of those examples were a carpet bombing approach. We all had one job: search satellite photos for clues. This challenge is a little different, but much more like the kind of thing we might want to mobilize for nationally in response to crisis. Those balloons could be anywhere. They'd be hard to spot. And depending on how hard DARPA wants to make this thing, a good portion of them are likely to be stationed in rural America. Since they announced the challenge a few weeks back, DARPA has updated the rules to say that if no one finds all 10 they'll give out the prize to the first team to find at least 5. This tells me it's going to be hard. Awesome!

Dumb Ideas

The web is full of commentary on this, and I'm repeating a lot of it. Here's a quick review of very dumb ideas, ranked in order to dumbness.

1. Send people out looking. Some people think the answer to this is to get a big group of people to drive out looking for these balloons. It seems rational on the face of it, like DARPA planned a big game of hide and seek. But this is very dumb. No group will be large enough to cover the necessary ground in time. Ryan's back of the envelope calculation:
   

   To aid with calculations, according to the CIA World Factbook there are 2,615,870 miles of paved roads in the U.S. If we assume that DARPA only considers 80% of those roads eligible for this challenge, and an average speed of 45MPH, it would take 46,500 hours to travel those roads, which is just under 2000 (person-)days. So how many people do you need in order to scout out all this terrain?

2. Offer a cash bounty and watch the tips roll in. Many teams think this will be won by offering to split the winnings amongst people who submit the locations of balloons. Nuh uh. First of all, we have a repeat of problem one above: how are people going to find these things, by driving around looking? Second, who is going to go driving around on the basis of a cut of the $40,000 prize? The problem with that is most people would view it like a lottery: you'll give me $3,000 for submitting the balloon location if I find it, but the chances that our team will win are so small anyway. Offer cash prizes and a very small group of committed people might be motivated to go driving around, but you won't get very far with that.
3. Look at satellite photos. Again, this sounds smart on the face of it, but it's not. This blog post on the subject puts it nicely:
   

   The very best resolution you’ll realistically get is 1.6 ft, meaning an 8ft red balloon will take up about 19 pixels. That’s not bad, but that’s only under ideal conditions, so if you’re trying to automate the process of finding those 19 pixels with computer vision, you’re going to get a lot of false positives (see below).

   To that add the issues of weather (clouds make balloons hard to see from above) and cost (it would be way more than $40k). You might imagine a collective effort like the Jim Gray search, but good luck getting enough people to care about this.

4. Data Mining. Armies of computer scientists read about this problem and started to design their Twitter crawlers to look for the inevitable flood of 'OMG WTF Red Balloon?' messages. This is the least dumb of the dumb ideas because they will actually find some balloons this way. It's a tiny fraction of people who know about this DARPA challenge, but there are plenty of people who might be curious about a giant red balloon in their neighborhood. But let's not get too carried away. This is still dumb. Reason: there are only like 12 people in the US who use Twitter. Ok, I'm exaggerating (a lot) for effect. But the point is, it's a small fraction of Americans who use Twitter and, more importantly, they mostly live in about 3 cities. Check out this beautiful NY Times visualization of Twitter usage during the Superbowl in Feb. Now try to estimate the fraction of the country in which there were no Tweets at all… Roops.

How to Win

So, as much as I like to critique other people's ideas, I'd like to offer my own opinion on how to win this challenge.

1. Forget cash. Splitting up the prize money will do no good. If you're going to motivate people to help with the challenge, it's going to be based on non-monetary, social psychological incentives. In other words, they're going to help because they're interested, because they think it's fun. So…
2. Focus on the hard to find balloons. I'm guessing somewhere between 3-6 of the balloons will be stationed in social media dense areas, so a lot of people will find them in the first few hours, and they'll be a lot of easy to spot chatter about it on Twitter and Facebook. So figure on someone else finding those, and worry about the balloons in that vast swath called middle America.
3. Harness the people who are out anyway. We can develop as many sophisticated motivational schemes as we want. We can donate the money to charity or get a major celebrity to mobilize people. We can design games with prizes and achievements and badges. Yay! The problem is that it's still a lot to ask of people to go driving around. So, why not get the people who are out driving anyway? Partner with trucker organizations. Get road trippers and cops. These are people who are driving anyway, so all the incentives have to do is get them to report in. Reporting and verification will still be an issue. So is communication. Truckers use CB radio, so design a an automated CB messaging interface. Road trippers are bored out of their minds, so make the balloons part of a big game of I SPY. Design an iPhone app. and give away instant music downloads – road trippers need new music! I'm not saying that's easy. Just easier.

Prediction

My prediction is simple: no one will find all 10 balloons. The winning team will find 5-6 at most. Most people will drastically underestimate the magnitude of this challenge. If DARPA wants to make this hard (and I think they do), they can make it VERY hard. The problem is that the only people who could reasonably plan this in time are the teams of technologists who think they can solve this through data mining alone. But they can't. Strategies with a real chance of winning would take too long to develop. DARPA will re-issue the challenge and up the ante.

Update: A few new ideas and predictions here. I'm so excited! Tomorrow's the day!

Free service, meet free service. FIGHT! Google's issue is that, to remain free, it's got to be cheap. Very cheap. They can't be paying higher fees! The math just doesn't work out. But this situation illustrates another issue with our expectations of free: if free services have to be cheap, does that mean we can expect lower quality service? Does that make free services a race to mediocrity? Google Voice certainly seems to be heading that way. What's frustrating is that many people won't care… until a service they use gets cut in cost savings.

What's even more troubling is that Google is arguing that it's not a phone company, so it can play by its own rules. Federal laws prohibit phone companies from blocking numbers, precisely because universal access is a communicative public good (using Fulk et. al's terminology). But Google just provides a piece of software that piggy-backs on the web. Well, excuse me, but that is bullsh*t, and regulators will soon show Google Voice that. When they do, will it be the end of Google Voice?

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If you've been up Half Dome, you know all about this. If you haven't, let me try to explain how ridiculous it is. You begin in Yosemite Valley at about 4000 feet, and begin the climb straight up past two waterfalls, Vernal and Nevada. We chose the Mist Trail (not so misty this time of year), which consists of a series of steep granite steps and switchbacks. About 2000 vertical feet and almost 3 miles later, you're at the top of the falls. Now hike another 2 miles (and 1000 vertical feet) to the base of sub-dome, where the hard work begins. A vertical-seeming face with switchback steps cut into it. Get to the top, and your reward is pictured to your left: a final, slick face of 50+ degree rock face with two thick metal cables running up it. Metal poles and slats are placed every so often. Grab a pair of gloves and haul yourself up. Stupid, right? Not as stupid as trying to get down, shimmying from slat to slat because your boots have almost no traction at all.

Well, we survived. Certainly there was spectacular scenery, but the most memorable part of the trip for me was being on the cables. It's like nothing I've ever done. On the side of this slick rock, hanging precariously off of a metal cable along with fifty or so other people. But somehow the only drama is a fallen water bottle or two.

In my research I frequently use the notion of social value orientation (SVO). The idea is that people have certain general dispositions towards the distribution of rewards from themselves and others. You've got the self-interested folks who worry about themselves. You've got the competitive folks who try to maximize the difference between themselves and others. And you've got the pro-social folks who worry about others.

Well, being the typical geek that I am, I was hanging off of the side of Half Dome and thinking about how my experience speaks to SVO. Getting up and down those cables safely requires that everyone works together. Some people are just worried about their own adventure, bitching about slower climbers and failing to make room for others when they need to. Some people just want to beat everyone – like the intrepid souls who decided to climb outside the wire and blow right past everyone. But most people are considerate and encouraging (pro-social), they help others, they're patient, and concerned for each others' safety. It's the only reason more people don't die out there.

I think it says a lot about human beings – or at least the people who go to Half Dome – that we can end up hanging on a wire, in a life and death situation (albeit a minor one), and that everyone looks out for each other. My experience mirrors what a lot of the participants in my interview research have been saying about Wikipedia. Why does Wikipedia exist? Why do people put in the time and effort? They believe it's because people are generally good and giving. Because they want to share, and they want to help. I think there are many other motivations that drive people, but I love that people believe in the good as a primary reason. Having been up and down Half Dome recently, it seems like a perfectly reasonable assumption.

I'm a gamer. I play video games. But unlike many gamers, I play only one game. So, I guess I should say 'I play video game.' I've dabbled around in others, but mostly it's just the one. I play Team Fortress 2 (TF2, for short), created by Valve. I bought this game a few years ago, and I've been hooked ever since. But, you know, I'm not addicted. I could quit any time.

I continue to be amazed at how it keeps my attention over time. In fairness, I was enabled in this time-sucking pursuit by an unlikely conspirator: my academic adviser, Coye Cheshire (also a closet gamer). As it happens, being directed towards this particular game was fortunate given my areas of research. For someone who studies online collaboration, social psychological incentives, and computer-mediated communication, TF2 is like a giant sandbox with one of those amazing lever-operated wooden backhoes. Engaging deeply with TF2 has convinced me of these things, which I hope also to convince you of:

1. Valve is brilliant. Team Fortress 2 is brilliant.
2. With respect to incentives and community management, Team Fortress 2 is the most socially advanced game of its type.
3. TF2 should be a model for designing and implementing effective incentives for online participation.

Over the next few weeks I'm going to post on a variety of topics and, I hope, 100% convince you of these statements.

Now, another nail in the coffin of that circumstantial argument. Slashdot is reporting about a Dutch studying finding the file sharing has positive economic consequences:

"In a study conducted by TNO for the Dutch government the economic effects of filesharing are found to be positive. According to the 146 page report (available for download, but in Dutch) filesharing is good for the prosperity of the Dutch: with filesharing more media are available, even though this costs the media industry some profit. One of the most noticeable conclusions is that downloading and buying are not mutually exclusive: downloaders on average buy just as much music as non-downloaders, but they buy more DVDs and games then people who don't download. They also tend to visit more concerts and buy more merchandise."

Unfortunately, it looks like the original news article and the report are only in Dutch. But, anecdotally, this makes a huge amount of sense to me for two reasons. First, these findings about media use are similar to findings about online sociality. For a long time, people thought that online social life was a replacement for offline social life, but evidence continues to mount that people who are more social offline are also more social online. Similarly, I think the most reasonable starting assumption is that people who use media more will use it more in both contexts.

Secondly, I think the hardest thing to measure about file-sharing is the degree to which sampling media via file sharing leads to more purchases. I, for one, can't count the times I've downloaded a song, an album, a movie, a TV episode from BitTorrent, and then later on purchased that same media or some other media in a legitimate form (CD, DVD, iTunes). Often it's because I'm not happy with the quality of the download, or I want the liner notes on the CD, or similar.

I share the loss of Peter Kollock with the many people who knew him. Peter died Saturday after a motorcycle accident near his home. Many people in the social sciences and beyond have been influenced by Peter’s works of scholarship, teaching, mentorship, entreprenurship and friendship.

Peter had a big impact on his many students at UCLA and the larger academic community that built on his scholarship. A lecture from Peter was a great thing that left his audiences feeling both smarter and challenged with a whole new landscape of choices. Peter brought many people to a better appreciation of the issues of cooperation and conflict, collective action and common goods, of trust and deception in risky transactions. He made it clear how most of our biggest challenges on this planet are cooperation dilemmas. He gave many of his students the inspiration to think that conflicts could be resolved and cooperation sustained by leveraging insights from studies of these situations. His was the only class I ever took that proved mathematically that it paid to be good to other people, even if there were short term costs. He saw early on the importance of communication networks to change the landscape of cooperation and collective action. His scholarship extended to the very real world of high tech entrepreneurship- building tools for markets on the Internet.

My thoughts are with his family and friends who appreciate the great presence Peter had.

I am shocked by his loss and will miss him deeply.

• DON'T press garlic directly into a hot saute pan. The smaller you chop garlic, the quicker it cooks. If you've ever minced some garlic and thrown it into a hot pan with some oil, and turned around to prepare the spinach (or whatever), only to find that when you turn back the garlic is crisp and crunchy already, you'll know what I mean. You can use a garlic press in this way, but change the order. Get the pan hot, add the oil, then throw in the spinach. After a second, press the garlic on top and mix. The spinach will start to give up its liquid and prevent the garlic from cooking too quickly.
• DO press the garlic directly into whatever you're working on – right into the pan or the bowl. When you press the garlic you get a lot of tasty juice. If you press onto your cutting board (for example), you lose that flavor.
• DO use a garlic press to make tasty salad dressing. Tamar's favorite quick vinaigrette is just salt, pepper, pressed garlic, olive oil, and vinegar. Add a bit of dijon for a little spice and a creamier texture (dijon is an emulsifier).
• DON'T think you can substitute a garlic press wherever the recipe calls for chopped garlic. The size of the garlic pieces isn't just about how quickly they cook, it's also about flavor and texture.
• DO press several cloves of garlic directly on top of steaks before they go on the grill. One of my favorite ways to prepare flank steak is to hit it with salt, pepper, olive oil, and pressed garlic about an hour before it goes on. Spread the garlic paste around so it makes a semi-even coat. When it hits the flame, the garlic caramelizes, and adds a wonderful richness and a bit of savory spice. Just don't add too much, or it'll burn and be pungent