A Big Day for Blog Friends

I feel like a bit like a trapeze artist at the moment, arcing through the air between swings. (Admittedly I feel like a trapeze artist very definitely in a metaphorical sense only, as I put my back out yesterday and am hobbling around the flat!)

We took the current Blog Friends service down a few minutes ago, and are now working furiously to get Blog Friends v1 Beta ready for prime time—hopefully sometime later today.

So whether you are an existing or would-be user of Blog Friends, please bear with us: we very much hope the wait will be more than worthwhile.

And the view up here is amaaaaaaaaaazing! ; )

[Cross-posted from The Blog Friends Blog]

Blog Friends v1 Beta launches tomorrow!

I can't quite believe it but it's true—Blog Friends v1 Public Beta launches tomorrow, after months of preparation and weeks of testing and bug fixing (it's hard to convey to those who haven't experienced it just how fiendishly difficult it is to get a complex web service working properly in Internet Explorer ; ).

I'll be blogging about Blog Friends v1 Beta at The Blog Friends Blog tomorrow, but in the meantime you can find some more annotated screenshots of the app in action on our flickr group.

Looking forward to welcoming y'all to the new Blog Friends tomorrow. (If you don't yet have Blog Friends added to your facebook account, just follow this link.) Oh, and the current Blog Friends service will be out of action for much of tomorrow while Benjie updates the servers—not a trivial task now we have over 18,000 users!

Your network increases your effective intelligence

Jamais Cascio, pondering trends in outsourcing, writes:

Ironically, it's entirely possible that the carbon footprint of shipping may add so much cost to outsourced manufacturing that those jobs get re-localized, whereas the knowledge jobs (needing only an Internet connection) end up being globalized.

So are we headed to a world where the only stable jobs are those that absolutely require hands-on contact—health maintenance, grooming, and the like? Or to one where wages even out across the world of skilled workers? Neither strikes me as terribly appealing or stable.

I think Jamais' observation about the likely re-localisation of manufacturing is quite persuasive. However, I have a feeling he's a bit off target with the second paragraph. While stable jobs for all but the most worker location-dependent tasks may come under threat, my guess is that the economic well-being of the successful knowledge workers will actually only continue to follow a power-law curve, with the richest continuing to get richer.

Knowledge workers don't get hired only for what they know or what they can do, but also for who they know—and, as Clay Shirky long since pointed out, winners take all in social networking. Why do people with great networks get hired? Partly through plain old nepotism, of course, but also because who you know effectively increases both what you know and what you can do by enabling you to outsource task fulfillment across your uniquely-valuable network.

Spiders

Thanks to Jamais Cascio for this link to Spiders, an "alternative history of the Afghan/U.S. war" in comic form that imagines a socially-networked technological future for warfare. With a name like that, it seemed like apposite material for a weaver's perusal. ; )

Social networking: eroding our ability to contain emotions?

Liz Else and Sherry Turkle ask:

Is social networking changing the way people relate to each other?

For some people, things move from "I have a feeling, I want to call a friend" to "I want to feel something, I need to make a call". In either case, what is not being cultivated is the ability to be alone and to manage and contain one's emotions. When technology brings us to the point where we're used to sharing our thoughts and feelings instantaneously, it can lead to a new dependence, sometimes to the extent that we need others in order to feel our feelings in the first place.

This is a really good point. We all need quiet time to digest life and incubate our dreams. Think I'll stop blogging now and go and meditate a while.

[Via Brian at The Liberator Magazine]