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Weblog:   Political Patterns on the WWW
Subject:   On my footlocker
Date:   2004-01-31 08:47:48
From:   timoreilly
Response to: On my footlocker

No question, brian. There are lots of us who are exceptions. But what social network analysis tools tell us are what *most* people do. And this kind of self-reinforcing pattern is extremely common.


At O'Reilly, we do what we can to counter it -- the open source convention, for instance, was an attempt to get the various projects together rather than in their silos -- and we do silly things like invite lots of Microsoft folks to our open source events. But that doesn't change the overall tendency of people to spend time principally with like-minded people and self-reinforcing ideas.
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  • brian d foy photo On my footlocker
    2004-01-31 12:44:51  brian d foy | O'Reilly AuthorO'Reilly Blogger [Reply | View]

    I wonder if I am most people though, really. A lot of surprising trends pop up when we actually think to plot the data. Now that I am looking at my list again, with only a few exceptions I appear to be a pretty crunchy guy from Northern California (which is true), and I just happen to be in the military. Granted, there are not too many people like me, but as one of my friends say "Everyone is a demographic". I just need to look in the right dimension.

    I was surprised to learn that there were at least three other people with similar reading habits in my company (about 200 people), which is why I have some of that. My copies of the Economist and New Yorker are highly prized, and I maintain a waiting list.

    Nat Torkington sent us a lot of books through his Northern Colorado Books for Soldiers project, and I know what people liked out of those, so I would like to see where our boundaries lie. I imagine I must be in the middle of at least a small island on that surface.

    I am also very curious about how people migrate through these clusters as time goes on. Most people might stay in the same place, but I have a feeling that if people get a new job, move to a significantly distant place, or start a new hobby (ballroom dancing, bicycling, whatever), those social groups exert pulls. So what are those forces? I know that most of my reading list comes from either what I see in the Economist or hear about on either Fresh Air or This American Life. However, my wife has injected quite a few things into my list, too---stuff that I would never had even bothered with if I did not live with her.

    I wonder if we could quantify such a migration and then map it geographically, although I do not think the islands of movement would be that surprising.

    Still, I probably am an exception since not too many people submit work to both the Sun and Soldier of Fortune, and get excited about really geeky graphing projects.
  • John W. Adams photo On my footlocker
    2004-02-03 03:27:21  John W. Adams | O'Reilly Blogger [Reply | View]

    I'm continually astounded by the narrowness of many, perhaps most, open source peoples' viewpoints.

    Trying to explain an objection I'd had presented to me at work to using this or that product often (not quite always) gets me extremely dogmatic answers.

    Some time back, in an advocacy forum I brought up lack of indemnification as a serious concern heard inside a corporation. The overwhelming answer was that, for a variety of reasons, indemnification was a non-concern and that corporations were foolish for worrying about it. In the minority are companies such as HP and Red Hat now offering indemnification against infringement claims.

    It puzzles me. How can we hope to convince people of the value of open source tools when we don't meet their objections head on? Why is our FUD any better than proprietary FUD?
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