The flickr code blog has an article on how Flickr is integrating Last.fm gig names into its photo pages using machine tags. We've been including their photos on our event pages for a while now. I head up public API dev at Last.fm, so it's nice to see both systems playing well with each other as a result of our recent API upgrades. It's how the web should work.

Power infrastructure in a favela, by andreasnilsson1976

Charles from Trampoline Systems organized a workshop on emergent democracy last week in Shoreditch. It was kind of interesting. I thought I'd post some quick notes.

First of all here's a rough definition of the phenomenon of emergence: A synergistic property or behaviour of a system that cannot be explained solely by the sum of its component parts; when the organization of a system exhibits dynamic behavioural properties that exist on a macro level in relation to its component parts. Systems that arise out of emergent phenomena are said to be complex.

One example of emergence is the development of the human foetus from the division of a single cell, through further division and specialization, into a complex human body. See Johnson's book Emergence for more examples.

Throughout the discussions it was clear there was a lack of clarity on the difference between strategies for refining democratic participation and a truly emergent system of governance. Emergence resists strategization because by definition it cannot be governed. In an emergent system it is precisely the lack of governance of the whole that allows complexity to arise from the behaviour of individual components reacting to particular constraints (governance at the component level).

This creates an interesting paradox of the expression emergent democracy. The question that the expression raises is this - what changes in participation and organisation will it take for democracy to produce a truly complex system of governance?

Let's take the complex system that arises out of traffic flows in a metropolis as an example of governing complexity. Individual agents (car drivers) are free within a set of constraints (the rules of the road, the placement of traffic lights, one-way streets etc) to make a set of choices about what route to take, how fast to drive, where to stop off and what time to travel. Car drivers really have a lot of freedoms in this system. Traffic flow is a complex system which urban planners try desperately to govern - with differing levels of success, because they don't often have good enough tools to predict the resulting behaviour of 100K+ car drivers. Because the simple rules governing the constraints on drivers mentioned above are increasingly not enough to deal with congestion in cities, governments begin adopting much more holistic governance rules (e.g. a congestion charge).

Admittedly, this is a field seeing a lot of research as a result, but it's an example of how complex systems and governance are often in tension. The rulesets that define cell replication and the instructions encoded in DNA do not attempt to govern the whole that is the human body. If you attempt to govern emergent behaviour with any top-down strategy, you eliminate the free agency of the component parts in the system. The analogy in the traffic flow example would be for urban planners to ban cars and allow people to only use public transport. Like this the level of governance would be such (the governance of routes and schedules so regulated) that the resulting traffic system may not exhibit properties of a complex system at all. What you've done is eliminate the free agents from the system. So it's difficult to imagine how you can successfully 'govern' emergent behaviour (by any accepted notion of governance) without extinguishing complexity; you probably have to re-define political 'governance' in order for it to be plausible.

In a truly emergent democracy, governance would play a role at the component level, in the rulesets that dictate how the individual citizen can participate, but would have to refrain from dictating, regulating or containing the emergent decision making patterns and structures that arise.

Charles highlighted a single change in the nature of voting that may drive emergent democracy: technology will force a shift from fixed place/time voting to continous voting in the near future. He backs this up with various historical reference points as to how technology has affected politics throughout human history. I'm inclined to agree with Charles, and this shift leads to all kinds of questions around representation and participation. Various other people contributed to an interesting discussion on the night:

Mako from Selectricity demonstrated their online polling system which has come out of research into civic technology at MIT; it supports several voting strategies (including preferential, condorcet and borda) and provides a wide variety of feedback on results. You can try out a quickvote for free or contact them for access to more advanced tools.

Sennse from Wikia provided an insight into arbitration and power dynamics at Wikipedia (which she worked at). Interestingly, Wikipedia takes the time to point out it's not an experiment in democracy or any other political system.

Edward from Involve also talked about their collaboration with local government in citizen engagement.

If you want to explore further try Joi Ito's essay on the subject.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that Joichi was an early investor in Last.fm, whom I work for.

Whatever time and space mean, place and occasion mean more

- Aldo Van Eyck (dismayed with modernism)

Van Eyck designed and built about 700 playgrounds throughout Amsterdam from the 1950's onwards. Social network designers could learn from Van Eyck's thoughts on and approach to public space - he petitioned for these areas of play and dotted them throughout the city as spots where the 'seeds of community were sewn'. A whole generation of children found themselves playing in the very heart of their city, in all sorts of unlikely locations. The playgrounds were rarely cordoned off from the city around them - they were open, exposed areas that forced kids to come up with rules for play and security. They brought unlikely elements together, valued ambiguity and looseness in function and blurred borderlines. You can find more information on his playgrounds and another article here.

How others compared you recently: "Who is hotter", you won 0 and lost 1 time.

- 'Compare People', Facebook App Email Notification

Thank you Facebook application platform, for all that you have done for me in 2007.

Small medieval towns and villages would likely have been populated by one or more high-density networks, and closed networks still exist in working-class and ethnic communities in modern cities. On the other hand, those towns in the Middle Ages where a middle class was forming and social mobility increasing were characterized by low-density (or 'open') networks... For our purposes here, what matters is that high-density networks act as efficient mechanisms for enforcing social obligations. An individual belonging to such a communication net depends on other members not only for symbolic exchanges but also for the exchange of goods and services. The only way to preserve one's position in a network, and hence to enjoy these rights, it to honor one's obligations, and the fact that everyone knows each other means that any violation of a group norm quickly becomes common knowledge. In short, density itself allows a network to impose normative consensus on its members.

Manuel De Landa, 'A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History'

Live demo of Photosynth (Microsoft Labs) from Ted.

Developers, developers, developers just found a new platform. It's a pretty major breakthrough for social software on the web. Credit to Facebook for their innovative and forward-thinking implementation. Overview here.

Flickr phonecam shot from govan depicting me fumbling with a presentation remote

First of all thanks to everyone who gave their support at the Future Of Web Apps conference in London last week. I had an amazing time and met many awesome people - absorbed lots of energy and enthusiasm and gained some interesting insights. Thanks again to Carson Systems for having us on stage and even letting us drag our last.fm sound-system over to the conference to stream FOWA group radio in the foyer of the Kensington Conference Hall...

Matt & I spoke on the first day, on the topic of 'Lessons from the Building of the World's Largest Social Music Platform'. Corante has written up some notes, and someone even posted a great mindmap of the talk.

2 slides I particularly enjoyed presenting:

• Demonstrating osmotic communication through our internal wonderbot, irccat. In response to one of the questions on the day, our CTO RJ has open-sourced our implementation of irccat so you can start playing with it. To clarify - we use irc as our internal comms channel, and all aspects of our company absorb information through it.

• Attention as filtering tool for user-generated content, in the context of tag cloud moderation. The talented heiress Ms. Hilton was used as an example.

Other bits and pieces - I referenced this Fred Wilson blog post on the future of media with respect to the monetization of attention data. Also someone in the audience brought up the principles of the AttentionTrust, set up by Ed Batista and Seth Goldstein. If attention data is going to be critical to your web app (and I would argue that it should), then I encourage you to read Seth's entire blog archive on the subject of attention. I know I pretty much have.

My personal highlight was hearing Bradley talk on Flickr interestingness and Yahoo! Pipes (which caused quite a stir in the last.fm office last week). I was particularly bummed out about missing Simon's openID presentation on the second day, as it was ace by all accounts.

A podcast of our presentation will be up soon, but in the meantime download the slides - 'Lessons from the Building of the World's Largest Social Music Platform' (pdf)

Hackney Road, London. Do winners really replace words with numbers?

Well, it's taken a while, but Google Reader's social features are finally taking shape, though their sharing feature is essentially a 'reblog' feature, simply publishing all the items you want to share on a public page - here's mine. The feature would be better off targeting your gmail contacts and allowing you to share an article with a specific person/group (either via email or via the reader) - after all, 'share' and 'republish' are very different things.

The obvious tagging feature is there, but no powerful tag navigation method is on offer and the search facility is ironically non-existent. So there's still a lot of work to do on the navigation front - the most crucial design problem for a newsreading app. I think the navigation itself needs to have a social dimension (tag-driven content drawn from 'pools' of articles, not just your own explicit subscriptions).

Interesting to note the attention data is now pretty much collected real time, and a lot less crudely than in the first generation of browser based RSS readers - as you browse a particular feed, scrolling through the articles makes the feed 'articles read' count go down article by article, meaning that the reader knows if you really have set eyes on an article or not. Google's concerned with capturing accurate attention data - and it's beamed back at you on the reading habits page; right now an interesting set of trends, but pretty useless until the reader starts recommending articles/feeds based on the data. Kind of like our last.fm profile pages - pre-radio, pre-recommendations. So with a pinch of collaborative filtering and more interface nous, Google Reader is set to be quite a big product. As it is, Gmail still seems to be losing the interface wars against Yahoo! mail (i find Gmail incredibly efficient myself), so it'll be interesting to see how the newsreading attention is distributed amongst the big players. It also depends if they can ever recover from their disastrous first impression (the first version of the Reader was truly a shocker and put lots of people off, myself included).

Whilst i'm not using Google Reader (I use Clippr and NetNewsWire), I've become a regular user of google notebook of late. Very quick to use, and comes with a firefox extension. May have something to do with using 4 computers on a daily basis.

The micronation of Sealand is for sale, and PirateBay wants to buy it through microdonations. Presumably in order to establish a digital (mini-)utopia, seeing as copyright regulations are a little thin on the ground in the principality of Sealand. More pics.

Cristian Vogel, of super_collider fame, has just put his entire new record on Last.fm, straight from the mixing desk - unmastered. So go check out the Night of the Brain previews. Great to see established artists utilising the network in a way that shortcuts the traditional publishing process and gets music direct to the listeners. Nice one Cristian.

On Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man

The single most important piece of writing I read in 2006; Sennett's 1976 study of the public and private sphere through the ages (in particular through the last four centuries) is erudite, expansive, thought-provoking and profound. Defining the city as "the place where strangers meet", Sennett goes on to demonstrate the breakdown of the public sphere by the emergence of personality, the cult of the individual and the erosion of the boundary separating public from private. Sennett is a sociologist with the ability to study the bigger picture without getting lost in a statistical labyrinth. Here he takes a selection of detailed observations scattered through the centuries, probing deeply into the social relations of one particular era or location at a time (he dubs the technique "postholing"), and brings them into a wider ideological frame. It makes for highly interesting reading.

Sennett believes the public sphere has been in deep crisis for quite some time, that the public and private need be clearly distinguished for healthy social relations to exist, that personality is a narcissistic construct that threatens public discourse, that public space in our cities should be rich with interaction as it once was, that we endlessly seek the intimate in public interactions. The book includes an analysis on the social relations that brought about cosmopolitanism, the rise of the bourgeoisie, clothing and its evolving role in identity, myriad observations on the impact of urban planning on social interactions and a lot more.

I'm curious to know how Sennett views the hyperlinked 'social network' environment of the present day. He's talking in kensington next week at an RCA debate, so perhaps i'll have a chance to ask him myself at some point.

Anyway, essential reading for anyone with a commitment to social software (beyond the 2.0 hype machine).

MySpaceaphobia: the agoraphobic feeling of being a tiny individual roaming around in an enormous social context, being chatted up and chased by shills, sock puppets, and unsavory characters.

- Stowe Boyd, Human Scale, Neighbourhoods, and Myspaceophobia.

This harks back to my comments on Flickr and the mass ID suicide.

Well we're up for the 'best music community' award at the upcoming BT Digital Music awards - it's people's choice so vote for us!

Reasons why we might be the best candidate in the shortlist:

• We're not owned by Rupert Murdoch
• We're not a glorified download store
• We're passionate about social software in the widest sense
• We've been commited to our community for years now (we're not hopping on the social network bandwagon)
• We actually innovate
• We're nice

Update: We won this! Thanks to anyone who voted through this here post.

On last.fm. Why such hate?

Sony research group demo an 'augmented surface'

Spurred by Miranda's reference to Malcolm Gladwell's article, The Social Life of Paper and other articles on the subject ( MIT Press' The Myth of the Paperless Office, Passion for Paper and Bill Gates' paperless working methodology), i thought i'd throw in my $.02.

I really can't see a case for paper in the workplace outside of enhancing co-located group sessions/workshops (i've described some below - Gladwell points one out as well). I'm trying, but i don't see it. At least for software development, though i believe this view is defensible for a range of industries.

One of paper's great advantages lies in its physicality. As a result of its portability it can potentially radiate information to multiple people in different locations without any technology requirements other than a pen/pencil. It's spatially flexible and provides a low barrier to authorship.

When you access paper-based information, subtle authorship traits are clear (handwriting and drawing styles communicate myriad things to us which digital typography and rigid outlines do not). Paper media retains these traits so well because the paper/pen combination provides one of the greatest interfaces mankind has ever come up with. It allows for much self-expression. From an accessibility perspective, the printed press gives you high resolution fonts you can take to bed with you. No eye-strain included.

So it's not all bad for paper. But the paper-less office isn't a myth. I don't use any paper at work. The only pieces of paper i have touched involve HR processes such as holiday forms (arcane admin rituals).

I use OmniGraffle or a whiteboard for quick visualization of ideas. Whiteboards beat paper hands down for radiating information to groups in the workplace (see Cockburn). Textual collaborative, dynamic information resides in the web browser - accessible by all, manipulable at all times. Wikis, chat-rooms and project management tools sit there. The browser is our core communication medium.

For notes, I have OmniOutliner which i also use to deconstruct large problems into identifiable tasks. Technical designs can be drawn in applications pretty quickly. These designs can then be uploaded for others to comment, in their own time. I can re-organise and re-prioritise my tasks at a keystroke. I can take notes on a meeting with others, during a presentation (backchannel). Put all this together and paper is starting to look a little ragged.

In the processes of archiving and organising (search/sort), paper also makes a weak case for itself. Digital alternatives exist for tracking ideas, dialogues, designs, tasks and most other everyday information. The notion that paper is a more secure information storage mechanism is also often mistaken and i can only assume comes from a misunderstaning of modern technology (stories of giant electromagnetic guns and hackers making people nervous).

In contrast examine the issues that arise from using paper instead of digital tools, and accumulate these over time (no versioned history of events, unsearchable, restricted ability to re-organise, closed access). It's a cludge. Moreover, it's potentially harmful; paper is, after all, the medium of bureaucracy. Solutions to everyday design problems require agile, accessible information. You need to be able to mix and match approaches, sculpt them in a group environment and change them on the fly. Your chosen media should reflect this.

The only place i see for paper in software dev is in CRC cards and planning sessions (blitz planning, sprint planning or xp planning games) - specialized techniques peculiar to the field (though kaizen-blitz sessions are widespread in the manufacturing industry). Broadly speaking, these are group processes taking place in one location, in which members pursue a single goal of identifying and organising many discreet chunks of information in real-time. Paper's spatial properties come to the fore here. Note that the paper is often thrown away after the session is complete and results captured.

All of these group operations could be carried out on a screen, but screens are interfaces to personal computers, which are designed with the individual in mind. Personal Computers are not for groups (as the name suggests), and a network of such computers does not constitute a true group interface. Turkle has alluded to the solipsistic design of the modern computer in the past. I think as better groupware interfaces are commoditized, such as augmented surfaces (sony research video), the use of paper even in these group processes will become optional and ultimately deprecated.

A Wired article entitled Man VS Machines examines the nature of newsreaders right now (Digg, Newsvine et al get a mention) and loosely categorises them into those that favour (AI) algorithms and those that leverage their user base to create semantic links between data. This is a false dichotomy, since both approaches should complement each other - how? Leave content classification & creation (data architectures) to the user, and the rest to the machines. The challenge lies in hybrid approaches.

From a technical perspective, the challenge equates to 'how to use the user base'.

The conflict the article alludes to is the same one evinced in Last FM Vs Pandora and can also be articulated as the AI VS AAI (Artificial Artificial Intelligence - a phrase coined by Rael from O'Reilly) debate. The supposed battle-ground is social software. I'd like to reinforce that the approaches are not mutually exclusive and that the future of social software rests in hybrid approaches, where human agents can consult non-human agents for search, data analysis (mining, visualization) and forecasting; all of which will require the breed of algorithms that are being thrown down the 'machine' end of the debate. Heavyweight AI (like highly refined NLP) is a waste of time at this stage though. It's an academic black hole.

If you'd like to help me build a Dymaxion house in second life - click the 'find' button down the bottom, click on the 'people' tab in the window that pops up and type in 'bucky'.

A side note: In my years of analytics and data mining, a recurring theme is that better algorithms are nice but better data is nicer.

- Steve Krause, in Last.fm Vs Pandora.

Caught up with Corante head, social network expert and organiser of the Symposium on Social Architecture, Stowe Boyd last weekend on Skype to discuss Clippr following his great post detailing a frustration with current RSS readers.

More interest like this might even convince me to deploy and open up clippr to the public in a more scalable manner.

Must. Find. The. Time.

Doing good stuff on the social software front - Last.fm. I popped by their office last week and liked what i saw (and i don't mean their fusball table, piles of CD's or digestive biscuits). Their set up is quickly becoming a data mining playground. In the form of the Audioscrobbler iTunes plug-in, this lot has wisely set up a data harvesting ethic that could hold big value for the music industry in the near future. It could also deal me tailored gig listings i'll actually use. Now that's something.

If you're looking for a flatshare in London in the near future make sure to bookmark Move Flat, which really just gets it. Julian, creator of Moveflat.com, understands the process. He's been there.

Here's what he says on his site:

This site is about not making journeys across London to look at something that turns out to be a complete waste of time.

That is what the site is for.

I'm not interested in running a property site where anyone can post anything.

That's because it really isn't very interesting for me to do it.

What's interesting for me is to use the internet to change things.

So I'm interested in ads that are interesting for people that are looking on the site.

That means the ads have to contain useful information for people that are looking for somewhere to live.

That means I am refusing between 20 and 30 ads a day on this site, every day.

... what has become important about all internet sites is trust.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

The only other internet service for Londoners that comes close to Move Flat is CraigsList UK. CraigsList is number 1 in NYC but still relatively unknown in London, so spread the word - it's like an internet Loot that works 10 times better and is run by nice people.

I'm posting this entry from within the all new hyped up OSCON'ed to hell and back Flock browser. It's got integrated blogging, bookmarking (del.icio.us) and flickr services. But the best innovation in Flock (most of it is just web services) is the 'shelf', a container for dragging and dropping images  and text during browsing. It acts like a halfway house for all these services. It's duh obvious, but good ideas always are.

Flock is built on the mozilla code base. So get XUL'ing kids.

OK so google have announced Google Reader, which is an RSS client for your browser. The best way to introduce Clippr is as an RSS reader i built that shows up Google Reader in most departments. It feels good to be ahead of the google this time ;)

I built Clippr as part of my dissertation over at Imperial. It's social software for the web. I use it everyday - it's become one of the most important apps in my browser, which i guess is enough reason to tell you a little more about it.

First off, a one-line description of Clippr:

Social bookmarking meets RSS feeds. A great way to discover, archive, create and share articles online.

OK, now for the details.

Overview

Clippr bears some similarity to the social bookmarking tool Del.icio.us, in that it allows users to tag and archive content from the web. However, where del.icio.us revolves around the concept of the 'bookmark', Clippr's main building block is a 'clipping'. A clipping is either a textual excerpt taken from a webpage or an article from an RSS feed. Both these types of clippings are treated in the same way by Clippr.

Why would a user want to take clippings?

Clippings are like a fluid bookmarking strategy for the web 2.0. They're a replacement of the bloated 'temp' folder which sits in everyone's browser bookmarks. They acknowledge the kind of transitory interest in numerous topics that the web encourages in users, as well as the fact that users are increasingly browsing by RSS feed. Clippings are a replacement of the bookmark per sé, in that they are represented as RSS articles and not simply as hyperlinks. Put simply,

Clippings tie a user's bookmarking activity to their RSS reading habits and provide a richer definition for archiving web content than a bookmark.

What's the big deal about folksonomy? It's just labels.

Um, yeah, like what's the big deal about computers, they're just big calculators. OK.

Folksonomy is a faceted, emergent classification strategy. It's the natural classification strategy for networked media, in that it addresses directly the fact that,

In an information retrieval system, there are at least two, and possibly many more vocabularies present. [14]

One of the main advantages of Folksonomy is that,

Since the organizers of the information are usually its primary users, folksonomy produces results that reflect more accurately the population’s conceptual model of the information. [35]

For more on folksonomy - and the sources of these references - check my dissertation.

What's implicit social software?

Social Software can perhaps be summed up as software that recognises the most important component of it's system is the user-base. If social software wants to do smart stuff, it does so by aggregating the intelligence of it's user-base, in terms of the data captured by the application during usage.

Implicit social software means getting rid of user profiles and user visibility in general and just letting the app use the aggregated information to work out relations between data. Like this the application functions like a single-user desktop application without all the distractions of social networking, but draws on community intelligence to help the user navigate the data architecture created by the user-base.

Text-analysis is rubbish, it gives me google adsense ads about detergent when i'm reading about the SOAP protocol

True. Clippr acknowledges the user-base as the central component in it's classification strategy. The system performs text analysis on incoming articles from user subscribed feeds, which it uses to extract keywords and top stories from the fresh crop of articles. Then, whenever a user's tag coincides with a keyword extracted by the system, all articles with that keyword are shifted over into the tag-space. This is a crude automated classification strategy which reconciles text analysis and tagging - it works pretty good.

Moreover, Clippr analyses tag intersections to recognise related tags, and presents these to the user as they search for articles. It's more subtle than del.icio.us in this respect, in that it quantifies the similarity between tags, in terms of intersection magnitudes.

So text analysis needs to be combined with context analysis to be effective at picking out similarity between documents, and that's what Clippr does, by letting users provide contextual information and analysing it.

Folksonomy is an uncontrolled mess. Jack says 'web', whilst Jill says 'internet'

True. Wordnet can be used to reduce the tag space by recognising synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms and compound terms, but it has limited performance with a completely uncontrolled vocabulary. Acronyms and neologisms abound in tagging. A lot of this is still unresolved and impacts the performance of search in folksonomy.

Show me the money

Here's the feature list:

• OPML import/export of feed subscriptions. Folders are flattened to tags and imported automatically into Clippr.
• Firefox plug-in and bookmarklet to facilitate clipping stuff from your web browser.
• Tag clippings, tag feeds, tag like a demon.
• A community oriented article base formed through user subscriptions, refreshed periodically. Full text RSS/RDF/ATOM formatted feeds are supported.
• Text analysis (article clustering) on incoming articles, in order to extract Top Stories and article keywords.
• Context analysis (tag clustering) used to recognise related tags.
• Change your tags whenever you want. Clippr handles merging/splitting of tag-spaces.
• Power editing using batch actions thanks to a gmail style dynamic dropdown.
• Tagging combined with keyword extraction to produce automated classification of articles. Text analysis and folksonomy reconciled.
• A search engine supporting a query syntax for folksonomy - search by tag (intersection/union), feed, keyword or any combination of these. Implemented as Live Search for desktop style responsiveness (it behaves like Apple Mail search - wipe the search field and return to where you were)
• RIS export for using web references in bibliographies
• RSS export of your Clippings archive.
• Mail an article to a friend or recommend it to a fellow Clippr user.

Ok, let's try it out

You can't. It's not public right now because it needs a dedicated server to run and i can't afford to run and maintain one. If you want to help me setting one up, please get in touch with me.

More information

Here's a quick presentation and here is my dissertation in full. Source code (ruby/javascript) to come.

Wow. I had plans to post a lot of things on here, but for now, general busyness has overloaded all these into bullet points in an OPML file somewhere. Speaking of which, OmniOutliner is the most critical productivity application ever made, by virtue of it's complete open-endedness and masterful key binding intuition. It's a work of art.

So what's changed round here? My dissertation on social software and the World Live Web is done & dusted (more in subsequent posts), my love affair with Ruby has blossomed (more - so much more - in later posts), i'm now working as an application developer in PHP5 and my ears are filled with podcasts (Open Source & PHP related), courtesy of itunes 5, making my commute to work almost bearable.

Elsewhere the gang of four, kernighan, knuth and hofstadter are illuminating the corners of my days.

Flickr is not a service, it's a social network. When people join a network, they seek community. Up until its Yahoo! acquisition, the services that Flickr offered for photo management also happened to be top quality; utilizing the latest technologies, offering a generous API, good cross-browser compatibility and a continuous enhancement of features through Beta. Just as importantly, the environment was cosy, with Flickr staff both good humoured and responsive to user feedback and groups of users forming genuine visual links between their lives. The small group of people who built Flickr obviously loved what they were doing. The broad but niche community of users obviously loved what they were communally accomplishing.

What happens when this gets assimilated into a service for a larger company like Yahoo!? Well, you get softly spoken demands to open a Yahoo! account in order to benefit from continued (paid for) Flickr services, followed by a lot of user paranoia, some clarifications, a Flick Off anti-Yahoo! user group and a lingering (perfectly valid) question,

I don't use any Yahoo! services. Why should i sign up to their network?

This is the question coming up again and again. It shows the psychological influence a popular network like Flickr has on its members. The attitude towards Yahoo! can be summed up as,

I don't belong there. I belong on Flickr. The two are miles apart.

In a tight network such as Flickr, membership to the network has real meaning to it's participants. It is a place with ethical co-ordinates and aesthetic values. It is virtual and yet it is not - Flickr had to pack bags from Canada and move to Silicon Valley. All acquisitions are symbolic, as well as physical/business transitions.

The Flickr team say the Yahoo! acquisition will allow them to integrate a lot of services including payment, but i must admit i'm all for successful startups resisting the temptation of acquisition, seeing a product through version 1.0 and pulling in resources independently. I'm also all for social networks not hankering after boundless growth - it can impede the social quality of the network for a lot of users.

Assimilation is certainly not the only option, since well crafted API's and strategic partnerships can deal with integrated services without a loss of corporate identity (if there's one thing Flickr had and is slowly losing, it's a strong identity around which a meaningful community can evolve). I'm suggesting resisting the lure of scaling up and putting the focus on increased features, finely graded account types and integrated services as a means of avoiding acquisition.

Perhaps the results of the David VS Goliath 'tag-fight' sum up the user-base's stance on the acquisition better than anything else.

More on Wired.

Yesterday afternoon i wrote to all my local MEP's (about 10) using the most excellent Write To Them (UK) site, which stefan over at whitelabel helped to put up a while back. It makes it easy to fax/email all your local representatives. On Mac OS X you can also fax any pdf out to whichever number you please (check 'Print' in any application).

What was i faxing all these people? My views on the European Software Directive which is up for the vote at the European Parliament this week. Tomorrow (Tuesday 5th July) to be precise. I had to cram it between a load of work so i only had to time to write this, but hopefully it will be read by my local reps, because i'm a member of their constituency (it's pretty pointless faxing/email any rep outside your constituency - you will largely be ignored):