U.S. Internet Users Pay More

for Slower Service

the U.S. is rapidly losing the global race for high-speed connectivity, as fewer than 8 percent of households have fiber service. And almost 30 percent of the country still isn’t connected to the Internet at all… .

The FCC’s National Broadband Plan of March 2010 suggested that the minimum appropriate speed for every American household by 2020 should be 4 megabits per second for downloads and 1 Mbps for uploads. These speeds are enough, the FCC said, to reliably send and receive e-mail, download Web pages and use simple video conferencing… .

The South Korean government announced a plan to install 1 gigabit per second of symmetric fiber data access in every home by 2012. Hong Kong, Japan and the Netherlands are heading in the same direction. Australia plans to get 93 percent of homes and businesses connected to fiber. In the U.K., a 300 Mbps fiber-to-the-home service will be offered on a wholesale basis… .

The current 4 Mbps Internet access goal is unquestionably shortsighted. It allows the digital divide to survive, and ensures that the U.S. will stagnate…

Think of it this way: With a dialup connection, backing up 5 gigabytes of data (now the standard free plan offered by many storage companies) would take 20 days… . with a cable DOCSIS 3.0 connection, an hour and a half… . With a gigabit fiber-to-the-home connection, it can be done in less than a minute…

a Hollywood blockbusters could be downloaded in 12 seconds,  video conferencing would become routine, and every household could see 3D and Super HD images. Americans could be connected instantly to their co-workers, their families, their teachers and their health-care monitors…

To make this happen, though, the U.S. needs to move to a utility model, based on the assumption that all Americans require fiber-optic Internet access at reasonable prices. …

As things stand, the U.S. has the worst of both worlds: no competition and no regulation.

Read full article by Susan Crawford @ bloomberg.com

A NEW KIND OF SOCIAL SCIENCE

FOR THE 21st CENTURY

- by Nicholas Christakis

Video is embeded in the middle of the post

The science of network-synchronized, emergent, self-oranizing, complex adaptive social systems!

Slime Molds:

How Amoebas Form Social Networks

Network Literacy Part 1

I’ve become convinced that understanding how networks work is an essential 21st century literacy. This is the first in a series of short videos about how the structure and dynamics of networks influences political freedom, economic wealth creation, and participation in the creation of culture. The first video introduces the importance of understanding networks and explains how the underlying technical architecture of the Internet specifically supports the freedom of network users to innovate.
- Howard Rheingold 

Network Literacy Part One 2

-

Networking technologies visualized as extensions

of our basic biological cognitive scaffolding

The National Research Council defines Network Science as:

“the study of network representations of physical, biological, and social phenomena leading to predictive models of these phenomena.

THINKING IN NETWORK TERMS

- by Albert-László Barabási

(moving towards - Organic Process Literacy)

We always lived in a connected world, except we were not so much aware of it. We were aware of it down the line, that we’re not independent from our environment, that we’re not independent of the people around us. We are not independent of the many economic and other forces. But for decades we never perceived connectedness as being quantifiable, as being something that we can describe, that we can measure, that we have ways of quantifying the process. That has changed drastically in the last decade, at many, many different levels.

It has changed partly because we started to be aware of it partly because there were a lot of technological advances that forced us to think about connectedness. We had Worldwide Web, which was all about the links connecting information. We had the Internet, which was all about connecting devices. We had wireless technologies coming our way. Eventually, we had Google, we had Facebook. Slowly, the term ‘network connectedness’ really became part of our life so much so that now the word ‘networks’ is used much more often than evolution or quantum mechanics. It’s really run over it, and now that’s the buzzword.

The question is, what does it mean to be part of the network, or what does it mean to think in terms of the network? What does it mean to take advantage of this connectedness and to understand that? In the last decade, what I kept thinking about is how do you describe mathematically the connectedness? How do you get data to describe that? What does this really mean for us?

Read the full post @ edge.org/conversation/thinking-in-network-terms

This is the End of Business as Usual

and

the Beginning of a New Era of Relevance

- By Brian Solis

His 10 step action list for creating a community based business strategy for relevance in an age of social-network connectitness.

1. Answer why you should engage in social networks and why anyone would want to engage with you

2. Observe what brings them together and define how you can add value to the conversation

3. Identify the influential voices that matter to your world, recognize what’s important to them, and find a way to start a dialogue that can foster a meaningful and mutually beneficial relationship

4. Study the best practices of not just organizations like yours, but also those who are successfully reaching the type of people you’re trying to reach – it’s benching marking against competitors and benchmarking against undefined opportunities

5. Translate all you’ve learned into a convincing presentation written to demonstrate tangible opportunity to your executive board, make the case through numbers, trends, data, insights – understanding they have no idea what’s going on out there and you are both the scout and the navigator (start with a recommended pilot so everyone can learn together)

6. Listen to what they’re saying and develop a process to learn from activity and adapt to interests and steer engagement based on insights

7. Recognize how they use social media and innovate based on what you observe to captivate their attention

8. Align your objectives with their objectives. If you’re unsure of what they’re looking for…ask

9. Invest in the development of content, engagement

10. Build a community, invest in values, spark meaningful dialogue, and offer tangible value…the kind of value they can’t get anywhere else. Take advantage of the medium and the opportunity! 

“Disrupting the Marketplace”
Interview with NiQ Lai

Some good advice for the
Ass-Backward CEOs that run
North American’s ISPs

Mapping Racist Tweets

in Response to President Obama’s

Re-election

A blueprint for civilization?

opensourceecology.org

STOP STEALING DREAMS: Seth Godin at TEDxYouth@BFS (by TEDxYouth)

Social Organizing Structures

beyond the

Market vs State

The Internet? We Built That

read full post @ nytimes.com

It’s not enough to say that peer networks are an interesting alternative to states and markets. The state and the market are now fundamentally dependent on peer networks in ways that would have been unthinkable just 20 years ago… .

One reason is that there is a growing number of individuals and organizations who believe the digital success of peer networks can be translated into the “real” world. Peer networks laid the foundation for the scientific revolution during the Enlightenment, via the formal and informal societies and coffeehouse gatherings where new research was shared. The digital revolution has made it clear that peer networks can work wonders in the modern age… .

When we talk about change being driven by mass collaboration, it’s often in the form of protest movements: civil rights or marriage equality. That’s a tradition worth celebrating, but it’s only part of the story. The Internet (and all the other achievements of peer networks) is not a story about changing people’s attitudes or widening the range of human tolerance. It’s a story, instead, about a different kind of organization, neither state nor market, that actually builds things, creating new tools that in turn enhance the way states and markets work.

read full post @ nytimes.com

“Threats & Opportunities for a Faster and Stronger Web” 

Velocity 2012: Albert Wenger, 

Rob Reid: The $8 billion iPod (by TEDtalksDirector)

From Amazon’s customer reviews

Too Big To Know - the subtitle :
“Rethinking knowledge now that the facts aren’t the facts, experts are everywhere, and the smartest person in the room is the room.”

This is the final nail in the coffin of secret intelligence communities and companies devoted to proprietary software. There is nothing intelligent, nor substantively valuable, about “closed” environments if ones purpose is to optimize both the allocation of resources and outcomes beneficial to the public.

The historical context:
Many people have been focused on the changing role of knowledge coming into the 21st century … . . this book says it best, in a form that is easy to grasp for non-digital leaders struggling to decide where to go next … . this book is highly relevant to the 1950’s mind-set that is still prevalent among the leadership of all eight tribes of intelligence: 
- academic
- civil society
- commerce
- government
- law enforcement
- media
- military
-  non-governmental / non-profit

Summarizing the book:
Everything we do now with hierarchical organization, hoarded information, restricted accesses, and isolation from the full range of external sources and methods, is wrong for the spirit of our times, wrong for our network-effect based zeitgeist!

Five recommendations the author discusses:
- Open up access
- Provide the hooks for intelligence (meta-data)
- Link everything
- Leave no institutional knowledge behind
- Teach everyone

Strong provocative message at 4 levels
-Strategic message
“The more one looks at the question, the clearer it becomes that we don’t have an agreed-upon explanatory [or even exploratory] framework within which the question might be resolved.” [page 114]

Operational message:
It is not about what you know or even who you know, but about the network you create so as to be able to access the right relevant knowledge when you need it, in the form you need it.

Tactical message:
Centralized authority rots — decentralized authority not only has the agility to be effective in situ, but decentralized authority is also much more likely to “see” and integrate local knowledge.

Technical message:
Citing Clay Sharky, “It’s not information overload. It is filter failure.”

KEY CONCEPT:
Knowing by the use of closed systems for reducing / filtering / weighting is out of date. Effective modern knowledge systems are linked / inclusive / open.

Today’s networked knowledge
is directly antithetical to every possible attribute of the top-down, “because I say so”, authoritarian, hierarchies Epoch. When even the Harvard Business Review acknowledges that CEO’s not only don’t know what they need to know to make good decisions, but are also not able to to make those decisions by themselves, the times, they are a’changing.

Old knowledge focused on FACTS.
Intermediate knowledge has focused on CONTEXT.
New knowledge is focused on RELATIONSHIPS.

The 21st century institution, like the 21st century network, must be very wide, boundary free, populist, respect those who are credentialed by the network rather than than credentialed by diplomas.

The 21st century institution, like the 21st century network, must be comfortable with a constantly changing “unsettled” landscape of culture, history, and local knowledge.

In all of this, TRUST is what determines the successful collection, processing, analysis, and decision-support rendering of information into intelligence. I speak here of informed trust, not blind trust… . . trust-building networks rather than a lock-box.

The author points out that in the absence of a properly designed network, the massive amounts of information that are accessible, and the new ability of every nut-case on the planet to be “co-equal” to more measured professionals, makes it very easy for even the most well-intentioned researcher to go off the deep end. In other words, not only must we have the world’s best OPEN networks at our finger-tips, we ALSO must have a profoundly professional combination of automatic, social, and professional filters and ingestion / visualization capabilities.

The author distinguishes between 3 types of facts:
- classic facts (in isolation)
- databased facts (indexed in a fixed structural context)
- networked facts (organically integrated/evolving facts which may have many different contexts, visible to different sets of people, and useful in different sorts of ways. 

The author speaks to the “network effects” on science:

- Science is flatter
One no longer needs to spend 8-16 years as an intellectual serf. To this I would add that science is now also real-time (that is to say, serious science versus show science). Changes to the earth that used to take ten thousand years now take three. Both science and politics are so removed from current reality and from an integrated public perspective as to be very dangerous to the human species.

- Network is continuously public
This is the part the secret world has difficulty with. They obsess on secret sources and methods as inputs, when all this time they should have been adapting to the prospect of being able to provide continuous decision-support to a full range of customers, in the process creating a Smart Nation. Instead they have a secret black hole.

- Open filters
Buy the book!

- Science with a difference
Cybernetics is now going in this direction, and we may be on the verge of a multi-disciplinary and humanities break-out in which the academic and government paradigms for thinking and studying experience an order of magnitude topsy-turvy “do the right thing, not the wrong thing righter.” This is a great time to be an intelligence professional. Buy the book!

- Hyper-linked science
Science and the humanities today are a travesty. I just ripped apart some psycho-babble about “Intelligent Management of Intelligence Agencies” at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, and I am still irritated. If we do not get serious about creating the World Brain and Global Game(Noosphere) as the Earth Intelligence Network has conceptualized the immediate possibilities, governments and corporations are going to continue a path that is tantamount to mass suicide for the human species.

Primary leadership responsibilities:
- connecting to reality
- make hard choices 
Primary leadership roles
- pick smart people that are self-starters
- creating and nurturing the OPEN networks that allows those self-starters to be all they can be
- be the catalyst for integrating diversity with clarity and integrity

read full book review by Robert D. Steele

read Robert Steele’s article:
The Craft of Intelligence – OLD vs. NEW

Check out Robert Steele’s up coming new book
The Open-Source Everything Manifesto:
Transparency, Truth, and Trust

“The solution to the information overload problem is to create more metadata!”

“metadata is what you already know and data is what you’re trying to find out” (Weinberger, 2007, p.104)

in what seems a disruptive argument, Weinberger tells that too much information is actually a good thing… . he cites Clay Shirky, who argues that “it is not information overload. It is filter failure”

Weinberger contrasts the long-form argument of the Age of Books with the loosely connected webs of the Age of Networks in which he argues, the long form argument is a constraint inherited from the medium of print. Our thought process, nonetheless, works not in a simplistic, linear and long form ways but in an intricate web of links and associations which is better reflected in the Age of Networks. Scientists work in private in the Age of Books, after-the-fact peer-review is the norm, but in the Age of Networks, he argues, the filtering process is immediate, open and on the cloud. In short, he argues the abundance of crap and good that is generated through the network gets filtered by the network itself.

read full review by  Getaneh Agegn Alemu

The Mega Song

Break Through Advertising

and

A Kick in the Balls for Music Industry Censorship