I'm moving my online home yet again. This time, though, I foresee a long stay. I'm now located at http://ashleywollam.com.

For those number-oriented folks out there who have a vested interest in social networks, Michael Arrington with TechCrunch delivers your Christmas gift early. In a thoughtful and thought-provoking piece, he provides a perspective which, I think, threatens to overturn our current (e)valuation of social networks - on both a fiscal and a social level. In Modeling the Real Market Value of Social Networks, Arrington suggests that the true worth of a social networking site should be measured not by how many unique users have registered with it, nor how many page hits it has per day/month/year, but rather by how much advertising is spent on each individual user. Arrington and company have built "a model taht looks at social network usage by country/region and compares that to available data on total Internet advertising spent in each of those countries. The model is then able to turn an apples-to-oranges comparison into an apples-to-apples comparison." As he goes on to state, "the early results are surprising.

Although I'm deep down uncomfortable with assigning different human beings with varying levels of value, I have to admit in the current state of affairs, such a formula only makes sense. Were the world totally flat, as Thomas Friedman imagines in The World is Flat, then each user might be valued totally equal to every other user. After all, their opportunity to "plug in" will be the same as everyone else. Now, though, the Internet pie is uneven and inequitable. As many respondents have pointed out, Arrington's model has some flaws. Nevertheless, I find the perspective refreshing and am excited to see what comes out of later models.

If you thought Facebook and MySpace were the height of social networking, think again. Likely you've already heard whispers about sleeping giants like SecondLife which are touting the same opportunities to "find" and proclaim one's identity, but are also making their services more "sticky" through creating a virtual world in which its users can do more than just interact, but also participate. Like the July 14 Business Wire article entitled "Gaia Online Completes Series C $11 million funding" goes to show, it seems that SecondLife isn't alone. Already more than 5 million individuals have plugged into Gaia's network and the number is climbing. Although the trend of people turning towards online landscapes for socializing surely doesn't surprise you or I, what should capture our critical attention is the manner in which they recruit the generation of boys, girls, men, and women currently coming into their own. After all, what reflects more accurately upon a group than the advertising ploys that suck them in?

As you can see from the picture I've included below (taken from Gaia's homepage on July 18, 2008), the biggest persuasive element is the bold, flashy phrase "Express Yourself." The captioning below that runs "There are millions of members on Gaia, but there's only one you." Our individuality, or particularity, is so crucial to us -- even the designers at Gaia recognize that, and yet still we attempt to express our particularity through a medium which cannot possibly contain or communicate it (see Dr. Corey Anton's essay "Agency and Efficacy in Interpersonal Communication: Particularity as Once-Occurence and Non-Interchangeability" in the Atlantic Journal of Communication). And while issues of expression are legitimate and demanding, I must confess to being amused by another persuasive element which apparently appeals to today's teens: right above the "Start Here" button rests the caption: "Registration is easy, secure and not boring." Not boring? Hallelujah.

Top o' the morning from Jason Fry, who in his regular "Real Time" column this week considers the evolving emphasis placed on personal webpages ("A Web Page of One's Own").

Although he affirms that having a personal webpage remains more of a leisure activity -- something unessential to wading through society -- he also issues a warning: the status quo will not be static much longer. He foresees a near future in which creating a personal webpage is as crucial to our professional and personal lives as other technological commodities: TVs, mobile phones, email, et cetera. It isn't hard to imagine this future, as individuals we interact with increasingly will refer you to their home on the web for pictures, contact information, or as a place where they conduct business.

Two themes in Fry's article interested me more than the rest: name-brands and narratives. He quotes a Slashdot conversation, in which one poster exclaims, "Your name is essentially your very own brand; might as well try to paint it in a decent light." This mentality congeals nicely with the best practices academia is instilling in recent graduates: business educations everywhere are reminding pupils that they ought to treat their name as a brand and consider their past achievements as their best reference. My leadership professors at the McDonough Center echoed this, instructing us to construct a professional portfolio which would communicate my brand, "the brand of I."

On a similar note, Fry observes that "A personal Web page is an opportunity to tell your story and balance out other narratives that you can't control." While Walter Fisher is probably tickled that his narrative paradigm is living the high life online, what I interpret from this is that the web is evolving into a place of conflict, where narratives are being wielded for some sort of victory; maybe one for power, or influence, or control - or maybe it just plain ol' authenticity. I'm wondering now if this trend towards conflict should concern us and how transitioning narrative conflict to the web will impact us interpersonally at home or in the office?

Just back from Europe and a writing hiatus. As I began cleaning out my inbox, I found a message from a friend who is taking a class entitled "The Science of Happiness." She reached out to me and a number of other people to ask a survey question, which I found to be really provocative. She simply asked us to respond to the question: "What does happiness mean to you?"

I sat and thought about it for a few seconds and then blurted: "Happiness to me means homeostasis, or an internal equilibrium, but for emotion. So, when we reach a continuous movement back and forth of the positive and the less-positive, we've arrived at a place where we can be content, or happy. I think."

I'm still going to chew on this, but am curious to what other people would say. Care to enlighten me?

I was sent a link to a speech by Newt Gingrich on Education. Not expecting much, I was surprised by the saliency of his speech. His "world that works" and "world that fails" model begs critical thinking.

View his speech here.

Alternately, if you're just interested in hearing a briefer introduction to his argument, view this clip, entitled "FedEx vs Federal Bureaucracy."

Fair warning: I could be very, very, very misguided in the observation I am about to make.

Earlier today I was driving on the freeway and happened to be listening (by chance) to the Rush Limbaugh show (hosted today by Mike Davis). I'm not conservative by any means, but I'll occasionally listen to Rush just to test my ideas against his. I have always believed if you can't weigh your thoughts and opinions against the opposition and have them come out stronger and better honed, what's the point of having them in the first place?

I listened incredulously as Mike Davis bemoaned the rising number of government enforced smoking bans because they were yet another example to him of government curtailing American liberty; as he slammed Michelle Obama because of her recent appearance on The View; as he comforted a caller (Marie) who articulated her despair over how easily people were falling to Obama's gimmicky rhetoric. This last caller, Marie, emphasized that she would be compelled to move out of the country if Obama is elected. Davis was quick to soothe her, saying, as best I can recall, "Now hang on a minute Marie, tap the brakes on all of that. I know that you feel strongly about this, but if we survived eight years of Bill Clinton, if we survived the Jimmy Carter presidency, if we survived....then certainly we can survive this. Not that we're going to, because Obama will certainly not be elected."

Throughout the time I was listening to this show, I had been again wondering in the back of my mind why a liberal or democratic radio show had not been able to take hold on American airwaves. It had been attempted, but never gained steam. I've heard Limbaugh criticize the attempt before, citing its failure to the fact that there simply aren't enough American's willing to jump on the democratic bandwagon in order to justify a radio program, in addition to other justifications. Today, however, I arrived at my own possible explanation.

I wonder if the reason why conservative talk shows are so much more successful than liberal talk shows isn't because contemporary individuals feel a greater need for shepherding, cheerleading, and a balm for uncertainty, whereas more liberal individual prefer a more independent, laissez-faire way of gaining knowledge and forming opinions. This occured to me as I realized that I grew most irritated with Rush or with any other talk show host at precisely the moment they began to preach, rather than to reach out to listeners. Occasionally they will leave the microphone behind, stop describing current affairs, and step up to the pulpit, where they proclaim what other people ought to think.

It seems reasonable to me, if only considering the stereotype, that conservative individuals of the baby-boomer generation are much more comfortable with a "big-brother" figure who is looking out for them, telling them what to think or what to hate, than liberals. In contrast, liberals would become irritated by such an attempt at making them conform. I should emphasize that I do not mean to suggest that conservatives can't (or won't) think for themselves, that liberals are "free-thinkers" who are smarter than conservatives, and nor am I trying to place a value on one or another mindset. I'm ambivalent, in general, to people's political orientation. In this instance, I was simply led to wonder if a part of the conservative/liberal paradigm might be empirically related to a certain level of Uncertainty Avoidance, and if the tipping point would correlate to one's political orientation.

Interesting.

The latest from PC World is as ironic as it is fascinating. Robert Strohmeyer reports on a burgeoning new crop of websites which are unlike anything we have seen before. These novel services are predicated on the impulse people feel to connect on social networking sites (SNS) and seek to drastically enhance the layperson's ability to connect online. Recognizing that many SNS users are generally active on not just one but a swath of SNS, these services capitalize on the fundamental trusim of their market generation -- that multitasking is always a plus -- and condenses the SNS a person is active on down to one convenient loctaion.

From my perspective (increasingly not the norm, I find), the irony lies in the fact that where one might suspect a person seeking "authentic" connections online might desire to put all of his or her eggs in just one basket, rather than spread them out all across the farm, now we see a service which allows you to spread all of your eggs across the farm, and hold a digital basket where you can keep your eyes on them at all times. It provides the illusion of solidarity, but promotes quite the opposite.

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See
Robert Strohmeyer, "Web Apps Manage Social Networking Overload" (Pc World, June 2 2008).

Jemima Kiss, writing for PDA: The Digital Content Blog recently wrote an article covering wadja.com, a relatively new social networking site headquartered in Athens, Greece. Although nothing stands out as particularly exceptional about Wadja.com itself, it has gained increased attention lately due to a controversial move by Facebook. Apparently, perhaps out of fear for unwanted competition, Facebook has banned messages which include the words "wadja" or "wadja.com." On reading this, I was initially skeptical. Not willing to take Jemima Kiss' word for it, I logged into my Facebook account and tried to message one of my friends about wadja. Sure enough, the message wouldn't process, even upon repeated attempts.

Although this sort of corporate underhanded behavior shouldn't prove overly surprising in the current era of cutthroat business tactics, it strikes me as odd and out of character for organizations belonging to this particular industry. Can social-networking combines, such as MySpace and Facebook, ardently claim socialization and networking among people as their top priorities and then comfortably pull stunts like this without fear negative PR? It seems to me that in light of this recent event, any member of Facebook has gained the right to seriously question this service's dedication to seeing its members connect with other individuals. Not to mention Facebook looks especially bad when contrasted to the cavalier demeanor of Wadja.com's managing director Alex Christoforou, who observes that despite "Facebook [banning] the word Wadja.com throughout the whole site," he simply found it "weird and quite amusing. Here is this big Silicon Valley social network banning the word Wadja, an outfit based in the Mediterranean, having fun connecting people." Since when did "having fun connecting people" cease to be the goal for Facebook?

Are we social network consumers left to believe that combines such as Facebook and Myspace aren't having fun connecting us any longer? Have we become the numbers that they energetically affirm we are not? Additionally, perhaps more importantly, are we being subjected to the tyrannical control of our free speech, thinly veiled as a measure to protect us from "spam?" With this sort of arrogant display of un-legitimized power we could be witnessing the foreshadowing of a significant shift in social networking industry for the worse.

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See

Jemima Kiss, "Elevator Pitch: Wadja's social network is big in Greece - and in big trouble with Facebook" (pda: the digital content blog, 30 May 2008).

Marshall Kirkpatrick, "Facebook Censoring User Messaging: Spam Prevention or Unaccountable Control of Conversation?" (ReadWriteWeb, 21 May 2008).

This evening my parents showed me a hilarious/interesting video on youtube. Enjoy: