I’m live blogging @ NYU using my 3G IPhone, forgive my spelling, grammer errors and lack of hyperlinks. I wrote about this lecture in my last post, and yes, I did decide to attend.

We’re talking about Etsy.com. Founder of Foundation for Peer to Peer Networking.

In 2003 if you asked “who do you trust”? You’d get the usual answers while in 2007, we trust ourselves more (people like myself).

P2P is undertaking relational, permissionless decision making. Now P2P can scale globally.

Strong Hierarchy without command and control, small groups to cooperate at a global level.

We’re reaching a point of self organization around common objectives.

New set of choices - 3 ways (Centralized, Decentralized, Distributed); example of civil society enable and empower creativity in a town in France.

Division of Labor, everyone can produce and there’s a peer to peer review process.

Individual self selects tasks and level of contribution. Transparent Process (WikiPidia). But you need open access to raw materials and the permission to use them. When costs of participation are low enough - new way of producing value (Wikipidia vs ), new way is hyper productive vs. The alternatives.

Innovation can only be competitive in the old way, in Peer 2 Peer, the default option is pasionfull participation (absolute quality).

Corporations can’t compete with Peer 2 Peer, when compared.

Social Change - when societies change it’s when the organizing (ruling) and production (working) changing together.

Sharing model - share your expressions, but the links are weak, and your platform is 3rd party.

Or, Wikipedia, where everyone is working toward a shared goal on the same platform.

Peer 2 Peer needs to be govern different. Peer goverence is not based on Market Scarcity.

But while this may work for Wikipidia, but will it work in building a car? Yes, as long as you design it first.

Open Source Car Projects. Peer Production as a model if what is coming next.

Ancient Roman Empire, moving from large scale production with slaves to a more localized product. But markets require scarcity.

In our society now we have a crisis of value; we can produce almost infinately but.. Much of it is not yet monitiable, and is becoming, therefore, unsustainable.

Rapid protyping shows means of production is becoming decentralizated. Relocalization of global production.

We can’t succeed without large scale particapation in Peer to Peer - Peer to Peer Society.

When Roman Empire fell, society had 500 years of local solutions via Midevil.

I wanted to see how far I could go with the iPhone as a replacement for my sketchpad and painting surface.

I had fun and lost sense of time, but when I finally gave up and felt as if I went as far as I could with my self portrait, 2 hours had passed.

A lot going on in the world, maybe more than usual. For one thing, I downloaded Google Earth for my IPhone today, and it felt as if the future, almost a science fiction future, suddenly materialized.

And then, the Economy, the World Mess, going into “withdrawal” over the “fake” pumped up financial system, that just crashed.

With all of this, decided to “go within” and paint about it, painting with Light, that is, on my iPhone.

I put two posts up today that I think are are worth reading, one at The Analytics Guru titled

Interview with Steve Victorino - There.com

I attended Virtual Worlds 2008 a little over three weeks ago but found it really hard to focus on writing up the interviews (the couple of them that I did) I did there and with this one, I really tried to put both the memory of speaking with Steve Victorino who runs There.com and synthesis of the information they presented to me.  As I was writing up this interview, I recalled that I was actually familiar with much of what There.com was doing, particularly with Virtual Coke and Virtual Branding - having done a painting last year on just that subject (see below)

I think you can see what my feelings are about Virtual Branding - it's more powerful than real branding - because there's no noise in a virtual world to interfere with taking in the Brand Message - so it could be almost …. like Cocaine, I suppose.

It wasn't, perhaps, my best painting, but I was exploring an idea, and that idea is tied in with Steve Victorino's There.com, in an off way - and that's what you get when someone asks me to do an interview.

The other interview is in ArtNewYorkCity - 

I was at my studio last week and was photographed by another artist - here’s the photo

See the rest and the work I'm showing at http://www.heartandsoulpilates.com/showing.html starting on May 3rd, 2008 

When I paint, and I'm happy with what I did - I like to post my work on my blogs, including this one. Web Analytics and Art have become parts of the same thing, for me, a way of synthizing information.

 Standing Self Portrait - Marshall Sponder - 2008 - 18" x 36" Oil Pastel on Canvas Paper

I spent about 5 or 6 hours working on this latest portrait - and wrote about it over at ArtNewYorkCity in a post titled Last few days and Standing Self Portrait.

Oh, by the way, the painting I was thinking about when I started my Standing Self Portrait was Nicolas Poussin's famous Self Portrait which I saw at the Metropolitan las night (it's on loan from The Lourve till mid May).

Painted a new Self Portrait today at my studio, wearing my Monster.com jacket that I got from my manager at Monster a couple of weeks ago; I think this portrait is one of my best - and you can see a larger version at TheAnalyticsGuru.com.

Self Portrait - 2008, Marshall Sponder, Oil on canvas paper, 18 x 24". 

I did a painting tonight and it suddenly hit me that part of what I'm painting is the idea, the topology of a Social Network.   Is it the Social Network my Social Media Committee is building for the Web Analytics Association - perhaps, maybe the spirit of it - though I think it's more than that.

Here's the painting -  Maybe I'll also post it on my Facebook Network.

 

This morning I read a post on Edward Winkleman's blog titled Art and Value which got me thinking about what the value of anything could be, particularly in social networks; I know that what Winkleman it focusing on is the value of Art -perhaps it's also applicable to Social Networking as well.

Here's what caught my eye:

 "…..Vermont State Police said three people arrested Monday in the thefts of large sculptures from inside and outside of artist Joel Fisher's studio last month were after the raw materials, not the works themselves, reports the Associated Press. The 30 works stolen are valued at a total of about $1 million; authorities recovered 23 of them from a scrap metal yard in Hinesburg, Vt., which paid more than $4,000 for the 3,000 pounds of metal. Bronze contains copper, which has skyrocketed in value from about 75 cents a pound in 2004 to upwards of $3 today.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The question of course is how do we determine the value of a work of art. It's a question we deal with constantly in the gallery (and I've blogged about it here), but stepping back and considering more than the issues of supply and demand, stories like the Fisher theft suggest it partly depends on who you know. The thieves were not, I'm guessing, connected enough to hawk the work as "art," which could have brought them a much greater return for their efforts. Indeed, three suspected thieves were arrested Christmas Eve and have been identified as "Joshua Staples, 18; Anni Wells, 26; and Roger Chaffee, 29." Strong they must have been ("some of the sculptures weighed up to 800 pounds"), but underworld masterminds, not so much. Had they known either Fisher (or his reputation) or someone within the segments of organized crime who can unload a stolen artwork, they might have managed better than 0.4% of the market value. (OK, OK, so this assumes there's demand on the black market for Fisher's work, but you know what I mean.)"

So the value of anything, more or less, is based on the value of communities who affixing value (who want's and needs the items or services).  

In this case, the kids that stold the metel scultures did not value, or know the the artist was well known in the art community, and went after the value of the metel, and not the artist's reputation.   That's simplistic but it gives me enough to postulate some ideas about value of information in a social network might be, probably should be, based on the relative authority of where the information comes (which might be partially determined by the number of backlinks and interconnectedness with others  in the the social network, or even outside it). 

Some of this information is fueled by a recent Social Networking study I wrote about in Interesting paper on the Measurement and Analysis of Online Social Networks gives a definition of "friendship in a Social Network" and how it would be measured (which I read in November):

 "..One of the reasons to understand the structure of Social Networks is to "…lead to algorithms that can detect trusted or influential users."

One of the findings is for the need of "influentials" at the center of the social network…

"….high-degree nodes in the core are critical for the connectivity and the flow of information in these networks."

What I'm going to suggest - that influentials not only be detected, but a value placed on a linking from those influentials.

Here's how it works in the first case with the stolden art works - which were sold for scrap metel (I'm not avocating the theft, but the way - it was terrible) instead of their value in the Art Market - it was  a function, according to Winkleman, of who you know.   In Social Network typology it would be something like this:

"….The correlation in link degrees implies that users in the fringe will not be highly trusted unless they form direct links to other users. The “social” aspect of these networks is self reinforcing: in order to be trusted, one must make many “friends”, and create many links that will slowly pull the user into the core." 

And Winkleman puts it this way:

"….. Had they known either Fisher (or his reputation) or someone within the segments of organized crime who can unload a stolen artwork, they might have managed better than 0.4% of the market value. (OK, OK, so this assumes there's demand on the black market for Fisher's work, but you know what I mean.)

All of which reveals that the rarefied environment in which hundreds of thousands of dollars would exchange hands for bronze crafted just so (versus what it yields once melted down again) is quite contrived. (No sh*t Sherlock, I know, but stay with me here…I'm verging on having a point.) Indeed, it seems to requires the complicity of more than a few people. 

"….Above I noted it partly depends on who you know. I think it also depends on what you expect or hope for."

I'm also thinking of the value of the Dollar - since it's not really tied to gold anymore, and hasn't for some time, it often fluxates depending on what others in the world community - think the dollar is worth, against, say…the Euro, or Yen, or anything else used to dominate value.&nbsp
;

I don't read BrainBasedBusiness enough but every so often, I notice a post on there that seems to fit a situation such as How You Communicate is Who You Become where the idea is whatever you express, with enough repetition, becomes the way your brain is wired to behave (actually, sounds like common sense).

"…Fortunately, communication can also wire the brain for prosperity. You can move your brain into a better place … simply  by communicating today … who you’d like to become tomorrow. Use tools such as good tone, for instance, and expect more good tone to lead you to a better place in the next day or so. The brain is shaped by your world and by responses you make to that world. "

I guess that would support a few observations, through personal experience, that 1) dwelling on failures intensifies them and 2) therapies that require you "feel your feelings" perhaps with the goal of owning them, are incomplete unless you can also find a way to change the feelings.  

What Dr. Ellen Weber writes in How You Communicate is Who You Become could be a way to do that - though I'm not sure what the parameters or metrics for that are (when can one do it on their own vs. needing help)?

I'm at the Louvre today, enjoying Art - taking the whole day to myself - but trying to hook up with pre LeWeb3 parties that might be going on tonight in Paris - haven't heard of anything, but if anyone of my readers is in Paris, and attending LeWeb3 (or even if your not), leave a comment here (and if you know what's going on Monday night - December 10th … today - you can post it here too … I'll even pass it along to others who might be interested via Facebook).