Toluu

Confused Of Calcutta

a blog about information

IP city twinning and habitual patterns and stuff like thatNovember 30

I just love this video clip. NYTE, the New York Talk Exchange, “illustrates the global exchange of information in real time by visualising volumes of long distance telephone and IP (Internet Protocol) data flowing between New York and cities around the world.”

What fascinates me is the grouping, the concentration. Somewhere in my mind’s eye, New York is twinned, in IP terms, with a bunch of cities in the rest of the world. And the grouping is different for different cities. The top ten cities that New York twins with will be different from the top ten cities that Boston twins with. And it is in that difference that we learn new things.

I remember reading a study some time ago on the use of mobile phones, and finding out just how habitual, how predictable, how localised we really were. The study, by Marta Gonzalez and Cesar Hidalgo of Northeastern, along with Albert-Lazslo Barabasi (of Linked fame) looked at understanding individual human mobility patterns, proving t

Missing the Whale: Will we soon pay to see it?November 30

Twitter stayed up throughout the Mumbai terrorist crisis; at least that’s the way it seemed to me, everything just worked. Never spotted the Whale.

And then today, a few minutes ago, there it was, in all its splendiferous glory, reproduced here for newcomers:

Sightings are getting rarer and more fleeting. So, according to traditional scarcity economics, we should soon be willing to pay to see it, right? :-)

Five-a-day mental habitsNovember 30

Andy Gibson of School Of Everything (disclosure: I’m an investor and board member) pinged me via this post. I was asked to list five things I do to keep myself mentally well (which I do below), to link to the Mindapples site (which I just did) and to invite, publicly,  five others to do the same (which I will do at the end of this post).

1. I go for a 30 min walk daily, varying my route as much as possible. Before I set off, I try and gauge how many steps I will need to reach my destination. This involves visualising the route, breaking it down into estimable chunks and then rounding it off. Then I try and keep count of the steps while thinking about other things. At the end of the walk I learn something about my estimation capacity, as also my ability to do foreground and background tasks in parallel.

2. Every night I will read for at least two hours, online and offline. Often it is more, but the minimum is two hours. At any given time I tend to be reading a number of books, sometimes as much as ten. Some I would I have just started, some would be nearing their finish. When I read at night, I try and switch between books a couple of times, just to learn about keeping switching costs low.

3. In the morning, on my way to work, I write down the things I want to get done regar

Musing about Twitter and crises and participationNovember 29

For many people, the recent and tragic Mumbai terrorist attacks had one unintended consequence: the coming of age of Twitter. As the FT put it, Twitter Turns Serious With Messages of Life and Death.

There’s a lot of good coverage out there in the blogosphere: Dan Gillmor, who first got me interested in the concept of “citizen media” sometime in 2002, makes two critical points about the difference between social media and MSM in his post Wikipedia as Vital Breaking News Source: one, the significantly higher frequency of updates in social media and two, the incredible richness of context provided via the the technique of linking. I guess Dan is the doyen of citizen media, he now runs the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Incidentally, if you’re interested in the space where social media touches journalism, you could learn a lot just by visiting Dan’s Center For Citizen Media blog. His blogroll, headlined Citizen Media Types, is an excel

When capillaries become arteriesNovember 26

It takes a tragedy to bring other messages home. My thoughts and prayers are with those who lost their loved ones in Mumbai, as also those whose family or friends were injured.

This is what the news looks like on Twitter, using Tweet Grid:

Hundreds, possibly thousands, of reporters. Many tweeting live. Many with original material. Many retweeting (RT-ing) others’ tweets, passing the news on at incredible speed. Sharing news of loved ones’ safety. Broadcasting contact numbers, cries for help, requests for resources ranging from contact information to blood. All at a speed that nothing else can match.

This, as Allen Searls once described it, is the World Live Web. A writable web.

As opposed to this:

It’s barely changed in the last hour or so. It’s glacial in comparison with the antlike fury of twitter. BTW, while writing t