I'm not a huge fan of video-based art. But give this clip, likely by the same folks who made this clip, 20 seconds. Then prepare for awesome. The grand finale is near-transcendent. [TNW] More »

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Albert-László Barabási believes that "despite the seeming randomness of human behavior, humans actually act in very predictable patterns." He's so convinced of this theory that he posted an incredibly addictive game-like version of his book Bursts online as an experiment. More »

Albert-László Barabási believes that "despite the seeming randomness of human behavior, humans actually act in very predictable patterns." He's so convinced of this theory that he posted an incredibly addictive game-like version of his book Bursts online as an experiment. More »

My favorite amateur sociologist Rob Cockerham printed up a bunch of price stickers for absurd products and sent them to his team of assistants around the country, who attached them to shelves in Costco stores.

One assistant's field notes:

It was a mad house today with all the snooty rich people fighting over free samples, but that was to my favor.  Everyone was so busy, that it was a piece of cake.  The only hard part was the Polo Assless Chaps, since our Costco hangs the prices above the items.  But nonetheless, I found a display right next to the main aisle of the clothing to place it.  It should be seen very easily.  The Canine Pacemaker Kit was placed right with the dog toys and dog biscuits. 

The Costco Prank

Editor’s note: The following set of excerpts is from the recently published book The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things In Motion by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison. The excerpts are taken from throughout the book.

Joi Ito, Information Magnet

As the number of people we can connect with expands, our ability to pull from that network the resources and people we require to address unexpected needs expands along with it. Using the tools and platforms emerging today any of us can now find a person in a remote part of the world who just happens to have the knowledge or expertise required to help us out. This goes beyond the reasonably straightforward search engines with which we’re all familiar. Those engines are tremendously helpful. But they mostly help us access information. Today’s search engines are far less adept in connecting us to people or to products. (One of us has a friend from childhood named Jonathan Smith. We’d love to reconnect with him, but a search engine query yields more than 46 million results.) Search engines are rapidly deepening their capabilities. Meanwhile, we can supplement them with our own social networks to find what we need when we need it.

Joi Ito experienced this first hand a while ago while traveling. Joi, as it happens, is about as experienced a traveler as they come. In his multiple roles as successful entrepreneur, adviser to big companies, angel investor, gamer, guild leader, and CEO of Creative Commons, Joi is rarely in one place for more than three days at a time. Now he’s in Dubai, rubbing shoulders with Pakistanis. Then to Milan for a public debate with a distinguished lawyer who’d recently called him a “pirate” in an Italian newspaper—and who will be a friend by the time Joi leaves town two days later for Tokyo. Then San Jose for a stretch, and on to Amman to meet with Princess Rym Ali of Jordan.

Seasoned as he was, Joi wasn’t prepared for what happened the first time he visited India. He’d arrived in New Delhi at 3am for a conference. The hotel, when he got there, was in a sketchy area of town—too sketchy, it turns out: he’d been dropped at the wrong hotel, one with the same name as the hotel where the conference was taking place. If he hadn’t been so tired, Joi might never have gotten out of the taxi. When he turned around to look for it now the driver had left already. The lobby clerk, after Joi finally managed to wake him up, handed him half a bar of soap and a padlock for the door of a filthy, heatless room. No drinking water. No towels. No broom for the rat droppings in the corner. Needless to say, the power outlets didn’t work either. Joi was by his own admission getting nervous as he fired up his Nokia GPRS with the last of his batteries and signed on to Internet Relay Chat. Minutes later two guys living in New Delhi asked him who he was, where he was, and advised him not to go outside until morning. Then, they told him, take a right out the hotel and a left on the following street—walking neither too fast nor too slow—and soon he should be able to find a cab the heck outta there, and over to the right hotel, on the other side of town.

Joi never met the two guys, either before or after they helped him. But that night in
New Delhi they were just what he needed.

Yossi Vardi, Mr Serendipty

Yossi Vardi founded his first company in 1969, when he was 27 years old. Since then he’s been an investor in, or godfather to, more than 70 Israeli tech companies. Perhaps his biggest success was the co-founding of Mirabilis, the company behind the first instant messaging technology, ICQ (“I seek you”), which AOL bought for $400 million in 1998. Yossi is also one of the best connected people in technology. “Yossi is a super-node,” British Technology executive Gary Shainberg told Business Week in 2008.

Only when the apple fell from the tree did Sir Isaac Newton begin pondering the nature of gravity. Only by setting sail for India did Columbus find America. Only by trying to relieve angina did a researcher at Pfizer discover a remedy for erectile dysfunction later marketed as Viagra. Only by going to a conference to hear presentations on the future of the Internet did Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page meet Israeli entrepreneur Yossi Vardi, who later gave them an important key for monetizing search results.

The innovation Yossi suggested was deceptively simple: put a vertical line down the Google search results page, dividing paid search results on the right hand third of the page from free search results on the left hand two thirds of the page. This small visual design alteration instantly made the integrity of Google’s search results visible and apparent by separating free results from those for which advertisers had paid. The change instantly set Google apart from its primary competitors at the time, where the line between paid and free search results was unclear. The uses of serendipitous encounters and discoveries could fill a whole book. In fact, it already has—Robert K Merton and Elinor Barber’s wonderful The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity. Yet most of us, despite the role serendipity has played in our own lives— introducing us to our future spouse, perhaps, or informing us of a job opportunity—tend to think serendipity occurs on its own, a function of fate or maybe blind luck. “But serendipity doesn’t just happen in a serendipitous way,” says Yossi Vardi. “You have to work for it.” Serendipity can be methodically, systematically shaped by our choices, behaviors and dispositions.

The Power Of Pull

Whether it’s in online gaming, amateur astronomy, open source software development, apparel manufacturing, or online music remixing—what is it that makes one set of circumstances right for individuals or institutions to flourish while others yield weak or even depreciating results? How can a group of obscure motorcycle assemblers in China challenge the best Japan has to offer? Why does World of Warcraft remain the most popular online game, despite competing titles that keep coming along to challenge it—and failing? How can a big software company attract into a sprawling virtual community everybody it needs to get a difficult new product adopted quickly? What, in other words, does it take to turn passion into success?

The common dynamic that we see underlying all of these success stories is what we call pull, the ability to connect with resources in ways that help all participants better achieve their potential. Pull gives us unprecedented access to what we need, when we need it, even if we’re not quite sure what “it” is. Pull allows us to harness and unleash the forces of attraction, influence, and serendipity. Using pull we can create the conditions by which individuals, teams, and even institutions can achieve their potential in less time and with more impact than has ever been possible. The power of pull provides a key to how all of us—individually and collectively—can turn challenge and stress into opportunity and reward as digital technology remakes our lives.

The key thesis is that, unlike previous generations of institutional change—when an elite at the top of the organization created the world into which everybody else needed to fit— the changes required to harness the power of pull will be catalyzed by and driven by individuals, from the bottom up. As each of us brings into the workplace the practices we have mastered in our personal lives, the institutions where we work will be transformed, and our professional lives along with them. Not every one of us will make this leap equally willingly or at the same time.

To get to pull, first we’ve got to come to grips with what push is and how it permeates our lives. Push approaches begin by forecasting needs and then designing the most efficient systems to ensure that the right people and resources are available at the right time and the right place using carefully scripted and standardized processes.

Push programs have dominated our lives from our very earliest years. We are literally pushed into educational systems designed to anticipate our needs over twelve or more years of schooling, which in turn are designed to anticipate our key needs for skills over the rest of our lives. As we successfully complete this push program, we graduate into firms and other institutions that are organized around push approaches to resource mobilization. Detailed demand forecasts, operational plans, and operational process manuals carefully script the actions and specify the resources required to meet anticipated demand. We consume media that have been packaged, programmed, and pushed to us based on our anticipated needs. We encounter push programs in other parts of our lives, whether in the form of churches that anticipate what is required for salvation and define detailed programs for reaching this goal, gyms that promise a sculpted body for those who pursue tightly defined fitness programs, or diet gurus who promise we will lose weight if we eat a regimented diet. Push knows better than you do, and it’s not afraid to say, “Do this, not that!”

Pull is a very different approach, one that works at three primary levels, each of which builds on the others. At the most basic level, pull helps us to find and access people and resources when we need them. Search—including Bing and Google —is an iconic example of this level of pull. There’s a wealth of data indexed and waiting for us. Quick and easy search is ideal when you know what you’re looking for. But in a world characterized by more unpredictable change, simple access has diminishing value. We are no longer certain what to look for – we even struggle to frame the questions.

In this world, a second level of pull becomes increasingly valuable – the ability to attract people and resources to you that we were not even aware existed but, when you encounter them, you realize just how relevant and valuable they are. Think here of serendipity rather than search. Serendipity often occurs in social networks, where we unexpectedly encounter friends of friends or even total strangers who prove helpful. We’re not simply talking about old style networking, however, where you “work” a party or a conference for everybody who might prove useful to you. We’re not talking about the mutual back-scratching of the old-boys’ network, either, to fix parking tickets or an embarrassing situation with a relative. Nor are we talking about pulling strings behind the scenes, or making Machiavellian use of information. Anyone approaching pull in a mercenary, “what’s-in-it-for-me” fashion is likely to get burned. In
act, he or she will not really be practicing pull at all, as they will offer no reciprocal benefits to the people and institutions with whom they interact. Pull is a way of creating value, period, not just extracting a bigger piece of some mythical pie for yourself.

These first two levels of pull—access and attraction—are ultimately static: they assume that the right people and resources already exist and that the challenge is merely to encounter them. But in a world of mounting pressure and unforeseen opportunities, we need to cultivate a third level of pull – the ability to pull from within ourselves the insight and performance required to more effectively achieve our potential. We can use pull to learn faster and translate that learning into rapidly improving performance, not just for ourselves, but for the people we connect with—a virtuous cycle that we can participate in.

Serendipity is also one of the secret ingredients explaining the continued growth of “spikes”—geographic concentrations of talent around the world. The Silicon Valley engineer attends his daughter’s soccer match and happens to meet another engineer on the sidelines. In the course of their conversation, the engineer stumbles upon an interesting solution to a design problem he had been wrestling with for months. And so on. When talented individuals choose to live in spikes rather than, say, small towns or rural areas5 they’re doing so because it increases their rate of discovery, making it more likely they’ll stumble on what they need. Of course, it’s important to choose the right spike. If you’re interested in surfing (or your child is), it doesn’t do you much good to live in Washington, DC, even if it might be easier to get there. Thus aspiring country musicians move to Nashville, while up-and-coming software engineers go to Silicon Valley or Bangalore, screenwriters to Los Angeles, models to New York, and so on. Talented individuals tend to go where they have the greatest chance of running into what they need in order to take the next step, even if they don’t quite know or understand what form it will take or who might inspire it.

Online communities are perfect for bringing together far-flung people who have common interests. If you want to find out what it is you don’t know that you don’t know, you need to hang out with other people who might already know it. Online social network sites like Facebook play an interesting role in all this. They help people stay in touch with their existing friends, but, increasingly, they also provide environments for serendipitous encounters with friends of friends or even people that one has never met before. Social scientists call these “weak ties”—people we barely know who can connect us to rich networks of relationships in domains completely different from ours.

Competitive Advantage Comes From Being In The Flow Of Knowledge, Not Stockpiling It

In markets and industries that were relatively stable, such as those in the industrial economy, a given stock of knowledge – whether it was a proprietary technology or a unique insight into how to organize production or marketing activities – could be relied upon to generate economic value for an indefinite period. The only challenges were to guard against others appropriating this knowledge and to design and execute the most efficient and scalable ways to extract value from this knowledge.

What we knew yesterday—either as employees or what our institution as a whole knows about its business—is proving to be less and less helpful with the challenges and opportunities we confront today. Growing topple rates (the rate at which companies lose their leadership positions) gives powerful testimony that stocks of knowledge, no matter how valuable at the outset, are diminishing in value more rapidly. Across many industries, product life cycles have begun to compress – early success with a blockbuster product has become harder and harder to sustain.

We must accelerate a shift to a very different mindset and practices that treat knowledge flows as the central opportunity and knowledge stocks as a useful by-product and key enabler. Increasingly, strategic advantage for corporate institutions will hinge on privileged positions in relevant concentrations of high value knowledge flows and the practices required to participate in and profit from these knowledge flows.

At Facebook’s F8 Developer Conference today, the company fleshed out its plans to become the social center of the web. With the new Open Graph API and protocol and the ability to integrate websites and web apps within your existing social network, the platform will become more robust than ever before.

The potential for this new technology is great — which is why partners like Yelp, Pandora and Microsoft have already jumped on board. But what does all of this interconnected data mean for user privacy?

Privacy has always been a bit of a thorny issue for Facebook and its users. In November of 2007, Facebook’s Beacon advertising experiment resulted in a class-action lawsuit, and Facebook’s big privacy overhaul in December provoked immediate criticism. The company’s more recent change to privacy settings for Facebook apps has been better received, but the user response to Mark Zuckerberg’s “public is the new social norm” stance has already forced the company to overhaul its privacy policy again — this time with user input.

Now that sites and apps can better integrate directly with Facebook in more than just a tangential way, the potential for privacy issues grows substantially.

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What Is Changing?

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In the past, apps that accessed data from the Facebook APIs could only store that data for 24 hours. This meant that apps and app developers would have to download user information day after day, just to keep up with the policy. Now the data storage restriction is gone, so if you tell an app it can store your data, it can keep it without worrying about what was basically an arbitrary technical hurdle.

While this might sound scary, it doesn’t actually impact how developers can use user data, just how long they can store it. Again, many developers were just hacking around this policy anyway, so users shouldn’t notice any changes.

Facebook is also getting rid of its Facebook Connect branding. Instead, Facebook login modules will be available to site owners, and users can not only log in or sign up for a service, but can also see how many of their friends have also signed up for the site.

Now, this new feature is cool — as is the universal Likes and customized content additions — but it also makes what you designate as “public” potentially more public.

While the login boxes and activity feeds that appear on websites will be customized for each user (meaning that what I see on a page will differ from what fellow reporter Jenn Van Grove sees), this information is potentially more easily viewable than it was before. It’s not like your Facebook friends couldn’t see this information in the past, it’s just now a lot more contextual and available in more places.

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Privacy Will Become the User’s Responsibility

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I took a look at the different documentations of the Open Graph API and the different social plugins, and gathered that the data collection and overall privacy settings don’t differ from what has already been available. Again, what changes is how that data can be displayed to different people and how it can be integrated in different ways.

Nevertheless, it is imperative that users who have concerns about privacy make sure they read and understand what information they are making available to applications before using them. Users need to be aware that when they “Like” an article on CNN, that “Like” may show up on a customized view that their friends see.

Public no longer means “public on Facebook,” it means “public in the Facebook ecosystem.” Some companies, like Pandora, are going to go to great lengths to allow users to separate or opt out of linking their Pandora and Facebook accounts together, but users can’t expect all apps and sites to take that approach. My advice to you: Be aware of your privacy settings.

What isn’t yet clear is if there will be any granular permissions for public data. For instance, I might want to share that I “Like” a CNN.com article with a certain group of people, but not make it public to my entire social graph. For now, users need to assume that if you do something that is considered public, that action can potentially end up on a customized stream for everyone in your social graph.

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How Facebook Can Avoid Getting Burned

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Because there aren’t really any changes in policy with the Open Graph system, Facebook will likely avoid any massive privacy violations; after all, if you agreed to make something public, it’s public. However, as Google learned with Google Buzz, users aren’t always aware of their default privacy settings.

Facebook can offset a lot of confusion and concern by doing a good job of educating users about the meaning of “public” and how the personalized feeds will work on various websites.

Developers can also help by making what information they collect and what information can be shared throughout the social graph more accessible and easier to understand.

Right now, it really doesn’t look like Open Graph will have any technical changes to Facebook user privacy. That said, the nature of how public information can be linked across different sites is now more robust, which makes it that much more important for the privacy-concerned to read the fine print.

What do you think of the privacy implications with Open Graph? Let us know!

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For more social media coverage, follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook

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Reviews: Facebook, Pandora, Twitter, Yelp

Tags: f8, facebook, facebook open graph, Open Graph, privacy

Need to create a visualization of tweets centered around a certain topic? You needn’t look any further than Revisit, a simple free tool that visualizes the temporal dynamic of a Twitter stream.

Revisit collects tweets related to a topic of your choosing, and displays them along a timeline. Tweets that receive more retweets or replies are displayed near the center of the stream, and have larger icons.

It’s not a static image, though: When a new related tweet arrives, it is highlighted; you can see its content and the relation to other tweets on the timeline. When there are no new tweets, a tweet is randomly chosen from the bunch.

The result is a nifty, animated visualization that can provide great background on a conference or a presentation. To make it even more attractive, you can type in a custom title and switch to full screen.

[via Infosthetics]

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For more social media coverage, follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook

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Reviews: Facebook, Twitter

Tags: Revisit, twitter, Twitter wall, visualization

The N900 is the most powerful, most capable, mobile device on the market today. Full stop. Nothing comes close. It's a peerless internet browsing device that doesn't nanny you like the iPhone and offers you both the freedom to tinker ...

There’s a trend that’s been disturbing me lately. When the topic of modding or jailbreaking comes up — say, in the wake of the iPad announcement, or Sony’s restrictive PS3 update — there is an outcry. Who am I to tell Apple what’s best for their devices? How can I in good conscience urge others to void their warranties or break license agreements? And why should anyone care when only a small proportion of people hack or jailbreak their devices?

These questions are natural, because a few years ago they wouldn’t even be possible. What reason would you have for breaking open an first-generation iPod, or hacking an original Playstation? The question of “unauthorized software” on System 9 and Windows XP was plainly moot. But as the capabilities of the PC, console, and phone have expanded, so have their magisteria. And as their power grew, so did their chains. These chains were so light before that we didn’t notice them, but now that they are not only visible but are beginning to truly encumber our devices, we must consider whether we are right to throw them off. The answer, to me at least, seems obvious: no company or person has the right to tell you that you may not do what you like with your own property.

Continue reading…

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For the networking nerds among you/us/me (self-disclosure)

Networks that are resilient on their own become fragile and prone to catastrophic failure when connected, suggests a new study with troubling implications for tightly linked modern infrastructures.

Electrical grids, water supplies, computer networks, roads, hospitals, financial systems – all are tied to each other in ways that could make them vulnerable.

“When networks are interdependent, you might think they’re more stable. It might seem like we’re building in redundancy. But it can do the opposite,” said Eugene Stanley, a Boston University physicist and co-author of the study, published April 14 in Nature.

Most theoretical research on network properties has focused on single networks in isolation. In reality, many important networks are tied to each other. Anecdotal evidence — the crash of communications networks (.pdf) in lower Manhattan after 9/11, the plummeting of markets around the world after the Black Monday stock market collapse of 1987 — hints at their fragility, but the underlying mathematics are largely unexplored.

The Nature researchers modeled the behavior of two networks, each possessing what’s known as “broad degree distribution”: A few nodes have many connections, some have an intermediate amount of links and many have just a few. Think of the networks as having only a few branches, but many leaves. On their own, such networks are known to be stable. A random failure is likely to disable a leaf, leaving the rest of the network’s connections mostly intact.

In the new study, the researchers connected two of these networks. While many node failures were required to crash the networks when they were independent, a few failures crashed the networks when they were linked.

“Networks with broad distributions are robust against random attacks. But we found that broad interconnected networks are very fragile,” said study co-author Gerald Paul, a Boston University physicist.

The interconnections fueled a cascading effect, with the failures coursing back and forth. A damaged node in the first network would pull down nodes in the second, which crashed nodes in the first, which brought down more in the second, and so on. And when they looked at data from a 2003 Italian power blackout, in which the electrical grid was linked to the computer network that controlled it, the patterns matched their models’ math.

That broad networks could be so fragile is surprising, but even more important is how rapidly the crash happened, with sudden catastrophic collapse instead of a gradual breakdown, said Indiana University informaticist Alessandro Vespignani in a commentary accompanying the paper. “This makes complete system breakdown even more difficult to control or anticipate than in an isolated network,” he wrote.

According to Raissa D’Souza, a University of California, Davis mathematician who studies interdependent networks, the findings are “a starting point for thinking about the implications of interactions.”

D’Souza hopes such research will pull together mathematicians and engineers. “We now have some analytic tools in place to study interacting networks, but need to refine the models with information on real systems,” she said.

Research into linked systems could help engineers build more resilient networks, or identify existing weaknesses. At the very least, they stress the importance of preparing for sudden, catastrophic failures. “We must recognize the possibility of big disasters, and take steps to prepare,” said Stanley, noting how unprepared political and economic leaders were for the financial collapse that triggered the current recession.

“These stories underscore that when trouble happens, we’re surprised. But we shouldn’t be,” said Stanley.

Image: From left to wright, a failure cascades through an Italian power network (overlaid on the map) and the internet nodes that depend on it (above the map)./Nature.

See Also:

• Scientists Seek Warning Signs for Catastrophic Tipping Points
• Slime Mold Grows Network Just Like Tokyo Rail System
• Searching for Network Laws in Slime
• Global Energy Network Depends on a Few Vulnerable Nodes
• 10 Companies Reinventing Our Energy Infrastructure

Citations: “Catastrophic cascade of failures in interdependent networks.” By Sergey V. Buldyrev, Roni Parshani, Gerald Paul, H. Eugene Stanley & Shlomo Havlin. Science, Vol. 328 No. 5976, April 15, 2010.

“The fragility of interdependency.” By Alessandro Vespignani. Science, Vol. 328 No. 5976, April 15, 2010.

Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecological tipping points.

What happens when you recreate Star Wars: A New Hope frame-by-frame by editing together a patchwork of 500 15-second crowdsourced scenes? Star Wars: Uncut, that's what. If this isn't a labor of love (and Lego!) I don't know what is. More »

Strange Maps points us to an interesting collection of 577 "map backs" published by pulp magazine company Dell Publishing — illustrations that pinpoint exactly where incidents happened in famous detective novels published between 1943 and 1952. This one is from Alfred Hitchcok's The Rope; other authors represented by Dell included Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, and Lange Lewis.

Maps of Murder: Dell Books and 'Hard-Boiled' Cartography [Strange Maps]

Jones just saw this in a London shop window.

BIGTRAK! He who shot the dog but lived to deliver the apple. Which will mean nothing to almost all of you, so I include this:

I am Warren Ellis, and today I have seen my childhood repackaged as a high-end replica. Which I guess happens to us all, but bugger but does it make you feel old.

(I never even had a Bigtrak. Too expensive!)

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Ruh-roh!

Since the text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (a secret copyright treaty being negotiated by a members' club of rich countries, out of sight of the United Nations) leaked, scholars and public interest groups have been poring over its clauses. Here are two alarming pieces of research explaining just how bad this really is:

First, Knowledge Ecology International analyzes the Provisions on Injunctions and Damages. They conclude that ACTA goes way, way beyond the TRIPS (the copyright/patent/trademark stuff in the World Trade Organization agreement), creating an entirely new realm of liability for people who provide services on the net. Since liability for service-providers determines what kind of services we get, increasing their liability for copyright infringement will make it harder to invent new tools like web-lockers, online video-hosting services, blogging services, and anything else that's capable of being used to infringe copyright.

This matters because various governments, including the EU, Canada, and the USA, have argued that there is nothing in ACTA that will change domestic law -- that it's just a way of forcing everyone else to adopt their own laws. What we see here, though, is a radical rewriting of the world's Internet laws, taking place in secret, without public input. Public input? Hell, even Members of Parliament and Congressmembers don't get a say in this. The Obama administration's trade rep says that the US will sign onto ACTA without Congressional debate, under an administrative decree.

Next is Public Knowledge's Sherwin Sly, with a broad look at what ACTA says and what it means:

But the potential effects of ACTA go beyond merely nudging interpretations of U.S. law in a new direction. Acceding to a new international agreement would hamper attempts to amend some of the flaws in our current law, locking us into a system that already has apparent flaws. ACTA's effects on the laws of other countries should also be taken into account, as we want to ensure that IP laws don't unduly hamper the free speech of other countries' citizens, or, to take a more commercial tack, that IP laws don't subject US technology companies, like the makers of digital recording devices or hosting websites, to overbroad copyright liability.

(via Michael Geist)

When Merton the Chatroulette Piano Guy burst on the scene last month, a considerable number of people believed him to be musician Ben Folds. Folds, in turn, started making like Merton at concerts, uploading his “Odes to Merton” to YouTube. Mashable recently sat down with Folds via Skype to talk about Merton, Chatroulette and whether he is, in fact, the man behind the hood.

Merton the Chatroulette Piano Guy garnered his fair share of fame from going on the video chat site and composing improvisational songs on his piano about the people he encountered there. Mashable recently spoke with the man, who prefers to remain anonymous, about his musical aspirations as well as striking resemblance to Ben Folds.

Many of you (including some Mashable staffers) remained unconvinced that Merton and Folds are not one-in-the-same. After Folds released his final “Ode to Merton” last week, we decided to contact the musician and get the lowdown on his foray into the infamous social site.

After speaking with Folds, I’m pretty much 100% sure that he and Merton are not the same person. Check out the interview below if you’re still not convinced, as well as our original interview with Merton himself.

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For more web video coverage, follow Mashable Web Video on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook

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Reviews: Facebook, Mashable, Twitter

Tags: chatroulette, music, viral video

"Pargon" on Flickr: the "Teabonics" set:

These are signs seen primarily at Tea Party Protests. They all feature "creative" spelling or grammar. This new dialect of the English language shall be known as "Teabonics."

George O'Connor's new Olympians series of kids' graphic novels retells the Greek mythos in comic form. The first volume, Zeus: King of the Gods, is just great -- full of dramatic upshots of titans and gods standing astride the globe, wiseacre dialog from the young Zeus, and horrific, crawly and monstrous denizens of Tartaros. There's a great set of lighthearted educational materials at the end, along with RPG-style character sheets for prominent gods and their offspring. The second volume, Athena: Grey-Eyed Goddess, comes out in a couple weeks, and on the strength of Zeus, I'll definitely be reading it. If you were lucky enough to discover the Greeks as a kid and remember the excitement of the heroic tales and grotesque comeuppances (not to mention all the creepy incest!), be prepared to renew your exhilaration.

Zeus: King of the Gods

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(Interior pages from Newsarama's review)

As a person who really enjoys flying airplanes, I never thought I would ever say this, but flying a simulator can be as much fun as flying the real thing. Of course it helps when the simulator is a replica of the space shuttle cockpit at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

On a recent assignment for AOPA Pilot magazine, I arrived early for an interview with Ken Ham, commander on the shuttle flight scheduled to lift off on May 14. While I waited, an engineer fired up the simulator where we were going to conduct the interview and let me make some practice approaches.

Known as the Shuttle Engineering Simulator, or SES, it’s not the full motion simulator used for full flight profile training, but rather a fixed-base simulator used by astronauts and engineers for both training and testing changes that will be made on the shuttle. The SES is very similar to the e-cab used by Boeing and other aircraft makers to test systems before putting them on the real thing.

Whether it was a change to a guidance computer, or an upgrade to the software controlling the nine glass panel displays, many of the improvements made to the shuttle over the years were tested right here. Shuttle commanders and pilots (commander is in left seat, pilot in the right) also use the SES for training, especially early on in their preparation.

The wood on the floor in front of left seat has been worn smooth by thousands of heels sliding back and forth controlling the rudder pedals over the years. With the news that the shuttle will likely continue flying into 2011, instead of being retired later this year as previously scheduled, the SES may yet see a few more heels.

Sadly, even with the extension, this was as close as I would probably get to my astronaut dreams. Still I was eager to try flying the heaviest and most expensive glider ever built.

Computers control much of the flight until the last 4-5 minutes before landing. So I was given the chance to fly several approaches into the Kennedy Space Center, landing on runway 15. My flights began with the shuttle heading east towards the Atlantic passing over KSC at 50,000 feet and 240 knots (equivalent air speed or KEAS).

It turns out the shuttle is a terrible glider. I don’t have a lot of glider experience, but I know that pitching nose down at 20 degrees and a descent rate of more than 10,000 feet per minute isn’t considered good. An airliner typically follows a 3-degree glide path when approaching the runway. According to Commander Ham, this is probably the biggest challenge facing the average pilot.

“The sight picture is a lot different,” he said, “but it’s a pretty easy task for an experienced pilot to make a safe landing with just a little bit of information,” Commander Ham said, adding that a perfect landing is very difficult.

Of course, like many things, it might be easy when everything is going right. It’s the emergencies and unexpected scenarios that require the bulk of the training.

“Then things get a bit more difficult. It starts to challenge your flying skills a bit more,” Commander Ham noted, saying it is similar to flying other aircraft where you train for emergencies. “It’s just another flying job.”

I paused and debated to myself whether or not to challenge that last point. Never mind.

Back in the sim, I passed through 40,000 feet and got ready to start my turn around the heading alignment cone or HAC, which is a guidance system that allows pilots to follow a circular descent path to the runway. As I continued the turn, I could see the Florida coast out the left window, and out of habit, I started looking for the runway.

My airspeed was around 290 knots as I turned to line up with runway 15 and pass through 12,000 feet. The shuttle is remarkably stable to fly as I suppose would be the case with any brick featuring stubby wings. Moving the stick is a bit unusual because it requires only small wrist movements.

Perhaps most interesting is that it pivots in the middle of the palm for pitch (controlling nose up or nose down). Commander Ham explained later that this is to prevent inadvertent movement during launch. “It’s a beautiful design, you can fly uphill at 3g’s with your hand on the stick and nothing happens,” he said.

So far the approach hadn’t been too difficult. In front of me there was a heads-up display (HUD) with airspeed, altitude and other key flight parameters. Most importantly there was a flight-path marker and guidance diamond. These navigation aids make it rather easy for a pilot to find the way to the runway and line up, assuming that everything is working. You just keep the flight-path marker on the guidance diamond and the runway should eventually appear in front of you.

On final approach, a pair of triangles rose from the bottom of the HUD when it was time to begin the flare, which slows the rate of descent. In a typical small airplane, a pilot might begin the flare at 10 to 30 feet above the runway traveling around 60 knots. In the shuttle, you start the flare at 2,000 feet and 300 knots. That part would take some getting used to.

“This is the critical part,” Commander Ham explained. “At 2,000 feet, if you don’t start pulling up, you’re going to die.”

So I followed the guidance on the HUD and touched down the main gear with a squeak at 200 knots with the nose still pointing rather high in the air. After what seeemed like a very long time, the nose gear eventually came down with a thud and I rolled safely to a stop.

A space shuttle commander has countless landings in simulators at the Johnson Space Center, and at least a thousand simulated landings in NASA’s Shuttle Training Aircraft. I realize I’m a long way from having the skills necessary to fly the orbiter. But if I were ever stowed away in the cargo bay and the announcement came over the speakers, “Is there a pilot on board?” I would at least have a chance of getting the world’s heaviest glider on the ground safely.

Images: Jason Paur/Wired.com

We’ve discovered a lot of great ideas here at The Economist Innovation Conference in Berkeley, California. Pixar’s President spoke on how the company creates great films and Paola Antonelli of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) discussed the history of the @ symbol, among other presentations and workshops.

Now one of the biggest forces in social media, founder of WordPress Matt Mullenweg, has taken the stage to speak about the open source movement, the origins of WordPress, and how it has fostered innovation.

Here are my notes on his talk:

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Open Source and the Origins of WordPress

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Mullenweg opened by remarking that open source is not about technology, but about people. He focused a little on the history of open source — he believes it started in 1984 at MIT. Since then, there has been a slow transformation of how we view software, from proprietary to free and open-source. The birth of Linux was one of the major turning points for open source.

WordPress’s founder then focused on his own story of starting WordPress: he didn’t build the software from the ground-up, but looked to the open source software that he was using at that time to blog. That software was b2/cafelog. When he and his partner Ryan Boren realized that it was abandoned, they decided to build on top of it to create a better open source blog software, the beginnings of WordPress.

A few years after he built WordPress, he built the company that now surrounds it: Automattic. The Automattic empire not only includes WordPress and WordPress.com, but Gravatar, Akismet, blo.gs, IntenseDebate, and PollDaddy. He also built his company to be an international, telecommuting company, because he wanted to get the best talent, no matter where they were. In fact, only six WordPress employees are in the Bay Area.

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Software Has Changed

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Software design has fundamentally changed, Mullengweg said. There is no such thing as a “killer feature” anymore because of extensions and plug-ins — if an app like Firefox or WordPress doesn’t have the feature you want, you can add it with an API or a plug-in. It means that everybody has a different, unique version of WordPress, and thus it changes how he builds on his platform.

The audience got a chance to ask questions; the big one was about how WordPress makes money. The answer: Back-up services, hosting, anti-spam, and other paid upgrades make the majority of revenues. While not many users buy these features, when you have millions of users it adds up. He also is happy that its revenue model isn’t overwhelming its users.

Overall, Matt Mullenweg is one of the biggest and most prominent proponents of open source. It promotes innovation because it allows developers to share ideas and code to build better ideas for less of a cost. WordPress’s founder said that the city of San Francisco this year will spend more on software than WordPress has spent in its entire time of existence. He hopes that eventually that kind of spending will go away as open source becomes a more integral component of our lives.

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Your Thoughts

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What do you think of the open source movement? Is it essential to the future of software? Is it monetizable and sustainable? Is Matt right when he says open source is about people, not technology?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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For more technology coverage, follow Mashable Tech on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook

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Reviews: Facebook, Firefox, Gravatar, Linux, Twitter, WordPress

Tags: innovation, Inovation Conference, matt mullenweg, The Economist, WordPress

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Online Journalism is dead (again), Long Live Online Journalism...

On the campus of Penn State University, a rivalry between a rogue campus blog and the official newspaper has become a fascinating mirror of the strife between old and new media. In only a matter of months, the unofficial campus blog Onward State, has marshaled the power of social media to compete with the award winning 112-year-old campus paper The Daily Collegian. With one-tenth of the Collegian’s staff size, Onward State has constructed a virtual newsroom that collaborates in real-time with Google Wave, outsourced its tip-line to Twitter, and is unabashed about linking to a competitor’s story.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this sociological Petri dish is that many of the players began as teenagers. In other words, the old/new media rivalry might not be generational, but ideological. What follows is a practical look at the successful social media strategies of Onward State, and a comparison of the world views of two camps of student journalists and their professional counterparts — a comparison that portends a long war to come.

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A Crowdsourced Newsroom

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“We focused on our Twitter presence from the very beginning, and it’s paid dividends for us in terms of referring traffic to the site and really becoming a part of the community,” said Davis Shaver, founder of Onward State. Tapping the power of the crowd has been essential to multiplying the resources of Onward State’s relatively tiny news team. By being responsive to the social media community, Shaver told Mashable that they “curated this ecosystem in the sense that people will actually send stories to us on Twitter.”

The transparent back-and-forth embeds Onward State into the hub of campus conversation. For instance, when an academic department decided to try its hand at democracy and hold a naming contest for the new student center, Onward State was a natural partner, whom they first informed via Twitter. As such, Shaver never underestimates the “sheer power that a well-run Twitter feed can have.”

On the other side of the aisle, The Collegian takes a decidedly expert-based approach. Editor-in-Chief Rossilynne Skena said that while social media is “great for getting out short bursts of information,” the Collegian’s competitive advantage is “really going into depth and detail about a particular subject,” complete with perspectives from local leaders. Instead of putting their ear to the social media grindstone, The Collegian tracks down leads through trusted sources. Once a connection is made, Skena prides herself on being able to assign a person experienced in the field with personal “training” from the Collegian.

Shaver’s defection from The Collegian, due to what he believed was a technologically-phobic bureaucracy, is a mirror imagine of what was happening to some newsrooms in the mid-2000s. Erin Weinger, a former Los Angeles Times fashion writer, recounts her frustrations with her editorial team. “It took multiple meetings and various e-mails to get the permission needed to get my section on Twitter,” she said.

“Journalism has remained so unchanged … that journalists didn’t feel they had to change.” As such, there was a general skepticism of online sources. “Leads can be found everywhere now, from places you’d never deem credible in the past. Amateur blogs, for one … But, five years ago, if you said you were citing a stranger on the Internet you’d [probably] get yelled at by an editor.”

Appropriately enough, Erin now runs her own LA fashion blog.

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To Link, or Not to Link

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It should be no surprise then that Onward State happily promotes a competitor’s story with direct links, while The Collegian questions the very logic of such a strategy. Shaver admitted that he doesn’t always produce the web’s best content, and has “no qualms about writing the blog post and porting to the story.” For Skena, linking to a competitor’s story “doesn’t make sense.” A symbolic move which tells readers to “go read our competition” would be devastating to the trust they’ve worked for over a century to gain, according to Skena.

The largely philosophical wrestling match over linking stories became a professional journalism crisis when a New York Times journalist was caught plagiarizing in order to push out a time-sensitive news story. Felix Salmon, a blogger for Reuters, argued that the root of this dishonesty lies squarely in the link-phobic mindset of old-media journalists.

“[W]hat’s more depressing still is that even the bloggers at the [New York Times] and [Wall Street Journal] are link-phobic, often preferring to re-report stories found elsewhere, giving no credit to the people who found and reported them first. It’s almost as though they think that linking to a story elsewhere is an admission of defeat, rather than a prime reason why people visit blogs in the first place.

Salmon concluded, “It’s a print reporter’s mindset.”

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Virtual Collaboration

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“Our office really consists of my dorm room, I guess. We don’t have any kind of physical structure, so we use [Google] Wave as our virtual newsroom,” said Shaver. Throughout the day, Shaver and his team monitor several waves at once, each tailored for a different department. In a single browser tab, Shaver has a unique eagle’s-eye view of the entire newsroom. In real-time, his editorial team can toggle between multiple conversations or throw an idea out to the crowd for greater perspective.

Consistent with its crowdsourcing mantra, Google Wave permits more inclusive perspective and helps keep eyes everywhere on campus. For perspective, Shaver uses Google Wave to canvas his writers, which hail from different social groups on campus. As such, he’ll put “the nucleus of an idea up in wave and [let] it float and see what people say about it.”

As for keeping tabs on campus activity, because there is no formal workplace, Onward State writers are already situated throughout the university. For instance, when the Oscar Meyer Weiner Mobile came to Penn State, Onward State reporters were already sprinkled throughout campus, and a writer in the vicinity could have been tapped to snag a quick photo. As silly as it may seem to give priority to something like the Weiner Mobile, hyper-local news is still about competitive advantage, and speedy reporting gives Onward State an upper-hand.

The low-overhead of a crowdsourced newsroom has become an appealing alternative as the Internet’s top destinations, from Craigslist to Google, erode the advertisement cash cow that once funded well-staffed newspapers.

Now, a talented writer with a broadband connection can reach the same audience. As new media advocate Jeff Jarvis wrote on his blog “I’m seeing that it’s possible for someone to come along with relatively little investment and a much smaller staff that operates more collaboratively to compete with the big, expensive traditional newsroom at low cost.”

In contrast, The Collegian thrives in the dynamic of a centralized newsroom. “What we really like is when we’re able to work with the people face-to-face,” said Skena. Instead of tossing up an idea to a digital billboard, Skena likes the ability to throw the keyboard to a colleague for help punching through writer’s block.

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Hobbyists Aren’t in it For the Money

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When Rupert Murdoch, chairman of Newscorp, began elaborating on its threats to pull Fox News content from Google News, the thrust of his point was simple: “Quality content is not free.”

Arriana Huffington, who’s blog was implicitly indicted in Murdoch’s article, responded with a visceral rebuttal. Huffington argued that people like Murdoch “can’t understand why someone would find it rewarding to weigh in on the issues — great and small — that interest them. For free. They don’t understand the people who contribute to Wikipedia for free, who maintain their own blogs for free, who Twitter for free, who constantly refresh and update their Facebook page for free, who want to help tell the stories of what is happening in their lives and in their communities… for free.”

Onward State’s motivational strategy seems to be representative of this view. “Money making is not something that we’ve really embraced yet,” said Shaver. The money from one fund raiser they did manage went to a staff party.

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A Divergent Future

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In reality, the “old vs. new media” split is not a cleanly sliced dichotomy. Media titans, such as CNN, now regularly respond on-air to Twitter chatter, especially during the 2009 Iran Election Crisis, for example. But, as Jon Stewart has joked, the adoption of social media has been a messy collision of disparate worlds.

Perhaps the future of how this will all unfold is again best foretold by the situation at Penn State. Onward State plans to dive into the dark waters of amateur content, developing a larger space for user-generated content on both Facebook and its website. The Collegian, in contrast, has just begun (as of January) to play with a more interactive Twitter feed, and is explicit about keeping user content at arm’s length.

However, it’s far too early to tell which strategy is, ultimately, more advantageous. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the flash-bang success of online college newspapers may be unsustainable, especially if a charismatic leader leaves the paper for, say, a semester abroad. Professional blogs as well, may find some undiscovered Kryptonite. If the pace of innovation is any indication, it may not be long before we know the answer.

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For more social media coverage, follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook

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More journalism resources from Mashable:

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- The Future Journalist: Thoughts from Two Generations
- Can E-readers and Tablets Save the News?
- 5 Essential Tools for the Mobile Journalist
- 8 Things to Avoid When Building a Community
- 8 Must-Have Traits of Tomorrow’s Journalist

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, fotosipsak

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Reviews: Craigslist, Facebook, Google, Google Wave, Mashable, Twitter, Wikipedia, iStockphoto

Tags: BLOGS, citizen journalism, facebook, journalism, newspapers, social media, twitter, universities, university