archive.Joe Lamantia.com

This is a small site with modest traffic. But it is still the case that a substantial set of inbound links lead people from diverse origins – search engines, blogs, content aggregators, feed readers, directories, etc. – to many destinations within the site every day. Some of these connections are visible in the del.icio.us tag clouds that appear with individual postings, my contribution to the Web’s ongoing collective experiment with tagging and social bookmarking.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu named this set of connections and the social relationships associated with them in the early 1970s, coining the term social capital, and thereby inspiring legions of civic and international organizations to create development, investment, and management strategies for this new valuable kind of resource.

But what is the value of the network?

Fast forward a bit, and we can see that no matter how you choose to calculate that value, Google has built a business relying the new resource of cumulative social capital, using it via mechanisms such as latent semantic indexing.

And we can see that in giving form and focus to the idea of social capital, Bourdieu set the conceptual stage for the recent explosion of social media and networking applications. Simultaneously destinations – albeit of unknown lifespan – and business ventures, the social networks are recent exemplars of longtime cultural movements of reification, virtualization, and visualization of fields – another key concept identified by Bourdieu.

Behind the scenes, the information architecture that solidifies the limited social capital of this site in physical / digital form is a motley collection of disparately named HTML files, tag destination pages, cgi-powered content streams, RSS feeds, local search results sets, etc. The prospect of getting another publishing platform to mimic this miscellany was – like tuning an instrument to play songs composed with notes from another music system – not something I could do as quickly and cheaply.

And so in combination with the perpetual urgency of the DIY mindset, the imperative of preserving the value of the existing store of social capital made the decision to upgrade along an existing path to MT4 simple.

Architecturally, this is the equivalent of sticking with the brand name you know well.

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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