archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Proving that satire is one of humanity’s fundamental instincts, Packetrat strikes a blow for (wood)fiber-based communications networks with paperblogging, or plogging.
Outstanding.

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A recent arti­cle from ZDNet — Researchers: Metcalfe’s Law over­shoots the mark — reports that two researchers at the Uni­ver­sity of Min­nesota have released a pre­lim­i­nary study in which they con­clude that Metclafe’s law sig­nif­i­cantly over­es­ti­mates the rate at which the value of a net­work increases as its size increases. The study was pub­lished March 2, by Andrew Odlyzko and Ben­jamin Tilly of the university’s Dig­i­tal Tech­nol­ogy Cen­ter.
Here’s some snip­pets from the paper:
“The fun­da­men­tal fal­lacy under­ly­ing Metcalfe’s (Law) is in the assump­tion that all con­nec­tions or all groups are equally valu­able.“
I’m always happy to find a dec­la­ra­tion in sup­port of qual­ity as a dif­fer­en­tia­tor. Of course, qual­ity is a com­plex and sub­jec­tive mea­sure­ment, and so it is no sur­prise that Odlyzko and Tilly first recall it to rel­e­vance, and then con­tinue to say, “The gen­eral con­clu­sion is that accu­rate val­u­a­tion of net­works is com­pli­cated, and no sim­ple rule will apply uni­ver­sally.“
It makes me happy when I see smart peo­ple say­ing com­pli­cated things are com­pli­cated. Odlyzko and Tilly are aca­d­e­mics, and so it’s in their inter­est for mostly every­one else to believe the things they study are com­pli­cated, but I think that there’s less dan­ger in this than in bas­ing your busi­ness plan or your invest­ment deci­sions on a fal­la­cious assump­tion that a very clever entr­pre­neur trans­mo­gri­fied into an equa­tion — which some­how by exag­ger­a­tion became a ‘law’ — in a moment of self-serving mar­ket­ing genius. I know this from expe­ri­ence, because Im guilty of both of these mis­takes.
Mov­ing on, as an exam­ple, Odlyzko and Tilly declare,“Zipf’s Law is behind phe­nom­ena such as ‘con­tent is not king’ [21], and ‘long tails’ [1], which argue that it is the huge vol­umes of small items or inter­ac­tions, not the few huge hits, that pro­duce the most value. It even helps explain why both the pub­lic and deci­sion mak­ers so often are pre­oc­cu­pied with the ‘hits,’ since, espe­cially when the total num­ber of items avail­able is rel­a­tively small, they can dom­i­nate. By Zipf’s Law, if value fol­lows pop­u­lar­ity, then the value of a col­lec­tion of n items is pro­por­tional to log(n). If we have a bil­lion items, then the most pop­u­lar one thou­sand will con­tribute a third of the total value,
the next mil­lion another third, and the remain­ing almost a bil­lion the remain­ing third. But if we have online music stores such as Rhap­sody or iTunes that carry 735,000 titles while the tra­di­tional brick-and-mortar record store car­ries 20,000 titles, then the addi­tional value of the ‘long tails’ of the down­load ser­vices is only about 33% larger than that of record stores.” {cita­tions avail­able in the orig­i­nal report}
This last begs the ques­tion of value, but of course that’s also a com­plex and sub­jec­tive judge­ment…
And with this they’ve intro­duced con­text as another impor­tant cri­te­rion. Con­text of course can take many forms; they make most use of geo­graphic local­ity, and then extend their analy­sis by look­ing at how com­mon inter­est in con­tent on the part of aca­d­e­mics func­tions as another index of local­ity, say­ing, “Com­mu­ni­ca­tion net­works do not grow inde­pen­dently of social rela­tions. When peo­ple are added, they induce those close to them to join. There­fore in a mature net­work, those who are most impor­tant to peo­ple already in the net­work are likely to also be mem­bers. So addi­tional growth is likely to occur at the bound­aries of what exist­ing peo­ple care about.“
The ref­er­ences alone make this paper worth down­load­ing and scan­ning. Read more of Odlyzko’s work.

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Thanks to all who stopped by to ask questions and express interest in some of the concepts central to executive dashboards, portals, or to simply say hello during the poster session at the IA Summit in Montreal. Many of you took cards, and I look forward to hearing from you soon. Based on the level of interest, I’m talking with the good people at Boxes and Arrows about how to share some of this experience and these ideas in more depth. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, until the summit site offers a full set of presenter materials, you can find the.pdf version (it’s a largish ~6MB) here.

The published description of the poster is below:

Executive Dashboards: Simple IA Building Blocks Support A Suite of Sophisticated Portals
This poster depicts how a small set of standardized Information Architecture structures and elements was used to create an effective suite of interconnected Executive Dashboards at low cost and without substantial redesign effort.

This suite of dashboards meets the diverse information needs of senior decision makers working within many different business units in a global pharmaceutical company. These dashboards incorporate a wide variety of data types and functionality, but present everything within a consistent and usable User Experience by employing modular tiles and navigation structures.

This set of modular tiles and navigation structures met the diverse information needs of senior decision makers operating within several different business units.

The poster shows how the basic IA component or ‘atom’ of a tile or portlet, with a standard structure, elements, and labeling can contain a tremendous variety of content types. The content types include qualitative and quantitative visual and textual data displays, as well as complex functionality syndicated from other enterprise applications. It also shows how tiles are easily combined with other tiles or portlets to create larger scale and more sophisticated structures that are still easy for users to comprehend, allowing them to synthesize and compare formerly siloed information views to guide strategic decisions.

The poster shows how simple information architecture components common to all the dashboards allow rapid access to a tremendous amount of information, from many sources. The poster shows how this IA framework scaled well and responded to changing business needs over time, allowing the addition of large numbers of new tiles, views, and types of information to existing Dashboards without substantial redesign or cost.

The poster demonstrates how a set of IA components allows designers to present critical business information by operating unit, geography, topic, or specific business metric, at varying levels of detail, based on the needs of specific audiences.
The poster shows how this set of IA components allowed numerous design teams to innovate within a framework, thus creating an extensive library of reusable tiles and views available for syndication throughout the suite of Executive Dashboards.
The end result of this approach to solving diverse design problems is a series of well integrated User Experiences offering substantial business value to a wide audience of users.

For those who would rather plant trees than cell phone towers:

The Canadian Film Centre’s Habitat New Media Lab in collaboration with the SEED Collective will unveil an innovative interactive art installation, SEED, during the scopeNew York Art Fair, March 11th to 14th at Flatotel, 135 West 52nd in New York City. This public interactive art installation invites participants to use their cell phones to plant “seeds” to grow a virtual forest.
SEED explores the convergence of rich media and wireless technology in the creation of a collaborative and evolving work of art. Through sound and imagery users create and populate a forest together. By dialing a particular number, each audience member will be given a “seed” to grow using the keypads of their cell phones. With each punch of the keypad, audiences have the ability to grow their seeds, choose the type of trees they want to plant, and change their texture and colour. After the three days at the scopeNew York Air Fair, the end effect is that all trees created by audience members will reveal a virtual forest.

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I’ve added a batch of photos to the Flickr group for the IA Summit here. More coming soon…

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