Learning to Dance

When I was first starting to learn swing, I was told by some well meaning people that I shouldn't follow - that I would get mixed up and confused.

All I have to say to that is, "Hogwash!"

By far, the best way for a lead to learn to dance is to follow another lead who is experienced.

Sure there are other ways that work well: imitation, close observation, leading a follow who is verbally giving instructions. None of these techniques can really compare, though to following a lead who knows what he is doing - so much of dance is spontaneous and intuitive; it seems needlessly difficult to learn dance without "feeling" it.

Real Social Networking

May you live in interesting times. -- Old Chinese curse

Fred Wilson recently wrote: Thinking About Etsy In The San Telmo Markets

Along with Seth Godin's talk about social media, this most clearly mirrors my thinking about social networking, and is perhaps a codification of the reasons for some of the backlash against social media that I'm starting to see build up over the last year.

The challenge for social networks, then, is to transition from the fake to the real, for the superficial to the meaningful.

Traders of Catan

Last night, I played "Settlers of Catan" for the first (and second) time. It is an amazing game - it certainly lived up to the hype.

One of the interesting things I noticed was that there was a sort of ephemeral monetary formation which happened spontaneously - extremely rare resources were typically held as stores of value, and occasionally as trade intermediaries. Unfortunately there is an extremely high degree of resource production variability, which resulted in unpredictable inflationary and deflationary effects, making monetary effects significantly risky.

Afterwards, I realized that this is an amazing opportunity to test monetary theory in the context of the game.

There are two theories (that are not necessarily incompatible) about why money is money.

The first is that money solves the store of value and the coincidence of wants problems.

The second is that money is that which is demanded by governments as taxes.

The proposed rule changes:

1. At the beginning of the game, each player is issued i pieces of money (hereafter called Crowns).

2. If a 7 is rolled and any player has more than j crowns, they have to give 1/k (rounded down) to the player whose turn it is.

3. Crowns can be traded whenever and for whatever other resources can be traded.

4. Crowns cannot be seized with the monopoly card.

The values for i, j and k need to be play tested, but I'd start with i=8, j=14 and k=3.

Reasoning behind the rules:

Rule 2 is written to balance opposing desires. The rules of the game are written so as to limit the ability of people to accumulate an arbitrarily large amount of resources (the robber) and to force them to trade. The money supply should be neither inflated nor deflated, so the robber can't simply seize crowns.

The predicted effects:

If a government tax is a necessary prerequisite for money formation, than player will be reluctant to accumulate crowns because they will fear a lack of future demand. Rule four serves to somewhat counteract this phenomenon; in order to better test whether or not a government tax is necessary for the formation of money, eliminate rule four.

If players use crowns as money, the in-game liquidity should improve, particularly in the latter part of the game. This should, in turn, decrease the value of ports.

Additionally, since the money supply is fixed and the quantity of resources increases over time, the value of crowns should increase gradually over the length of the game.

Links

The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell

Demand Media is leading a true revolution in the way media is being produced and it's happening right now. This is the other nail in the coffin of traditional media (the first being craigslist/ebay).

Secrets of a Solar Spymasters #20: Inside the Failure Cascade
Sins of a Solar Spymaster #22 – The Seven Types of Spy

The Mitani is the chief of the espionage/propaganda/intelligence wing of GoonSwarm, a Something Awful based alliance in Eve Online. The Mitani has witnessed and been responsible for the destruction of a significant number of alliances in Eve, and has been able to witness the fall out from within on a number of occasions.

Facebook events in Google Calendar, a work around

I use Google Calendar to keep track of my Facebook events. This has, up until now, been mildly irksome, as Facebook doesn't include a timezone in their iCal feed and Google doesn't let mere mortals override imported calendars' timezones.

Apparently this also irked a dude at Dudeami, who created a great middleman here.

The downside is that your Facebook events feed becomes public.

Regexp fun with Amazon

For some time, now, I've been recording all the books I come across that I might want to read in a list. It didn't take me long at all to realize that the only way I'd be able to stay sane would be to standardize amazon links in some canonical form, else the list would be twice as large as it already is.

I'd been struggling for a while with a poor first attempt at a good modified delicious bookmarklet, but I finally took the time to make one that actually works well.

Without further ado: Amazon-Delicious Bookmarklet

Defaults matter

Great post at Web Social Architecture called How Twitter promotes quantity to the detriment of quality and why Twitter matters nonetheless.

The meat of the post:

Why do people on Twitter care how many people are following them?

The answer is, because Twitter wants it that way. The affordance for social capital on Twitter is all about quantity: How many following, how many followers, and how many updates posted. The measure of a person, in Twitter, is all about the total amounts accumulated:
[...]
The display of these measures represents just a fraction of the text on a Twitter page, just a few pixels of space—but they’re critical, because they are the attributes attached to the representation of my identity. Effectively, they are me, and I am valued on the basis of their accumulation. Other people, at a glance, get a sense of who I am that’s based on the amount of stuff I have, and not what kind of stuff, and not on the value of that stuff.

This is a bad thing. As Twitter’s massive increase in number of users the last few months has started to illustrate, an increase in users also increases the breadth of topics, decreasing the signal to noise ratio. Six months ago, when Twitter was populated mainly by a relatively narrow group of social software and Web aficionados, there was a stronger sense of Twitter being a community. Today there’s much less topical focus, and Twitter’s limitations as a social tool have become much more readily apparent.

The fix: Build quality-based social capital.

What if, instead of showing, underneath my photo and name, the number of people I follow, the number of people following me, and the number of times I’ve posted, Twitter showed data that reflected the value of my activity? For example, what if my Twitter identity were associated with the percentage of my posts replied to, favorited, and re-tweeted by others?

Deeply insightful. I continually am surprised at how UI is the red-headed stepchild of product development, when it is the the thing that most influences a user's experience.