At the most recent Salon Fremont I gave a talk about authority and ownership on the internet. If you haven’t been before, the Salon is a gathering like a bunch of pretentious Frenchies used to have where attendees discuss their work or other topics of interest.

I thought the talk went really well. The most difficult part of it was to hit the right mix of technical detail– enough to understand the whole picture, but not so much as to make the important ideas inaccessible to those without a technical background. My co-presenter for the night was Kascha, with her shiny new PhD, speaking on the meaning of life. Thus my talk had to appeal to a crowd just as ready to discuss Arendt as DNS.

Like every Salon I’ve been to, I was amazed by the level of discussion that followed both presentations. If there’s anything like it in your city, you should find it; if there isn’t, you should start one.

I’ve posted my slides and notes. If it’s something you’re interested in, don’t hesitate to talk to me about it.

While thinking about how to route messages for a project I’m starting, I decided to flowchart every method of electronic communication I engage with on a daily basis, how they are routed, and how they get to me. Not sure what to glean from this yet. There’s definitely a lot more polling than I’m happy with. The only direct push is via txt (and phone, but I don’t talk on the phone regularly). Everything else goes through at least one tight polling loop. We can do better, internet!

I super don’t care what people from the internet at large have to say. I don’t care how many people that use a product like something. I don’t care what topics are trending across a gigantic cross-section of the internet. I don’t even really care about the zeitgeist.

What I do care about is what my friends have to say, what they’re interested in, and what they’re looking at. I even care about what their friends care about, though probably less. I even care about the content viewed and created by people in communities I somewhat identify with.

Recent additions to products I use daily (well, a dozen times daily) push online interactions more toward a mass audience than a closed social network.

Google Reader added the “Like” option in a not-even-paraphrased ripoff of Facebook’s similar feature (which I love). This feature sucks, and a brief search on twitter tells me that lots of people agree (umm, kidding). While reading my normal feeds I am now informed that some number of people also enjoy a particular post. I don’t know these people, I don’t care if they like the same webcomic I do, and that number has no significance to me. I hide the feature.

The other trend is the emphasis on buzz/search in twitter. I love twitter and I use it every day to keep in touch with friends both nearby and far away. I think it’s an excellent medium and I get immense pleasure from using it. However, twitter seems to be all about the trending topics and mentions on CNN right now, and not about facilitating communication between friends. I’ve never liked the “microblogging” aspect of twitter– I prefer to think of it as a big shared conversation with friends and friends of friends. Thus I don’t follow anyone I don’t know, except Stephen Colbert and a local music group.

These new features are even more disappointing to me because of the potential they really do have. I think there’s value in the “Like” feature and in trending topics, but not when the sample size is the whole internet. I want to know what my extended social network is talking about. I would guess my extended social network, the people who I could conceivably meet and get to know tomorrow, consists of around 2,000 people; it contains my friends, their friends, and so on, ranked by how many friends a person and I have in common. No one is adequately offering coverage of that group even though it is the group I actually care about.

I’ve known this forever, but I never really thought about how strange this is, and why it is strange. Print papers might have dating ads, right? And The Onion is actually a paper weekly in a few cities in the US, but its dating site is national. It’s definitely an online endeavour in my mind, so it strikes me as incredibly odd that this content site spawned a dating network. Weird.