I found a beautiful Haiku in a beautiful blog post on a blog, I was almost about to delete from my blogroll. But I tell ya, this is beautiful.

Rebels have to have 
rules often to feel that there's 
a cause for their acts

found at: When Poets get angry @ Seth Godin's Blog

EDIT: Yes, surely I know that this technically is a really bad haiku - but isn't it beautiful just because of it? ;)

So apparantly nobody got, what I meant with my social networking image from the Colliding in the real world to distribute the virtual post - not even my bro as you can see from the comments to the post!!

I won't go into too much detail here - I think it's most enlightening, if one discovers it for herself. But for some clarification I want to explain it a bit at least. I already had a good VoIP chat with my bro the day after posting it, but still I can't really put it into a couple of short and good sentences.

In the first image every circle stands for a human individual. And the links are connections between those individuals, just like it is in the real world. That's what is called the social graph, it's the reality.

In the second image we see, how the so called 'social networks' like Facebook, Friendster and Xing are built. There is one central database, that connects all those individuals. To us customers this is usually sold as a possibility to utilize our social graph on the internet. This is not really wrong as those sites are capable of modeling most of the stuff that makes a social network valuable, but still it's not the social graph itself as the picture clearly shows. If you want to tell your boyfriend about your sexual desires, then you don't put that information into a database owned by someone else and tell him to pull it from there, do you? I bet you would rather have him pull it from you or even better push it to him - just like in the social graph that is the reality.

Well, the third image shows how the social graph should really be modeled on the internet. Every individual got its own node, its own database on the internet which then connects to other nodes, other databases representing other people. This kind of thing basically is possible, it represents reality by far the best and it is already being worked on. It is inevitable that it will be reality one pretty soon day!

So what about that "Social Mining"-thing? Yeah, my bro already said it in the comment to the last post - this thing is not completely new. When you put 'social mining' in parentheses on Google (and even better Yahoo), then you get lots of hits telling you about it. Well, still I take that as a strong indicator for it not being anything mainstream yet. If it would be, then one would get lots of good hits without the parentheses. And the current hits mostly talk about gathering information from your Outlook contacts and usage. But basically, yeah, that's it! The thing I was ponding here with "Social Mining" was more: When this model of decentralized social networks becomes reality, then the most valuable player in the marketing field will be the one that can produce the most valuable information from the data available on the decentratlized network. You can't just go Data Mining in your Facebook-Database and tell companies what kind of book this guy bought and the reason for it is most likely that he saw a similar book on three of his friends 'I bought'-lists. Nope, with a decentralized network every individual owns her own data and so this will become much more difficult. And those special Data Mining skills will be known as Social Mining imho.

"Germany's highest court has restricted the right of the security services to spy on the computers of suspected criminals and terrorists." (BBC article).

I have been a fan of germany's highest court for a long time. The german Basic Constitutional Law is one of the greatest of it's kind worldwide and the Federal Constitutional Court is its guardian. And it often proved to be a worthy one as for example 25 years ago, when it introduced the basic right of 'informational self-determination'.

Our current minister of the interior has brought up many sick ideas lately and one was the invention of the so called 'federal trojan horse' - a computervirus that should be distributed to the people to be able to spy on their computers. Though I have a lot of faith in our highest court, I really feared how they will decide about this.

Turns out that there wasn't much to fear. This court really is worth every penny it earns and they didn't only stop the trojan, they didn't only declare the first law for it as being completely unconstitutional - no, they even made a gift to the german people, they gave us a new basic right:

This is awesome!!
I'd like to thank them from the bottom of my heart and if I ever meet one of those guys, I'll buy him a beer!

Next insane thing to come to their court will be the 'Telecommunications data retention' - but I'm looking at that more relaxed now, they'll figure it out! :)

Lately I began diggin' GTD and I have to say that I love my new hipster PDA, which I chose as one weapon to evaluate. imho GTD creates reminders by planning to make resources collide. Well, today was a day where resources collided by accident and something beautiful emerged - look at what I've done:

This is the result of months of breeding over thoughts colliding with a work brainstorming session following a talk with a colleague about social networks and the known revenue model of selling customer data.

Later then, in a chat with a very close friend of mine, I realized that there is a pretty similar revenue model for the next stage of evolution of social networks. Indeed this will create something called Social Mining - which will be (yup, for real: I googled and wikipediaed it and found nothing) the marketing term (or buzz word, if you like ;) ) by which it will be sold to VCs, commercial customers, press... in short: the public!

So thanks a bunch to everybody involved today and note to self: "Gotta get some evenly lined index cards". ;)

I just disabled trackback-pings to this blog as I was making more advertisement for Pr0n than for Free Software. If you want to trackback me, contact me by email please.

Also I realized, that the images in the Blog are all f#$+*d up, somehow the imageids aren't correct any more. I'll fix that all later sometime - until then you can probably have a couple of good laughs by scanning older posts and reading the comments to some images. :P