Today I am giving a lecture titled “User Labor” at Neuberger Museum of Art. I will speak about the flaws I see in the Architecture of Participation –-data ownership, data valuation-– in relation to the User Labor project. We will discuss living physical/digital processes and aesthetics of extreme use in networks and their relation to contemporary art making. I will present instances from “MYPOCKET,” “Meta-Markets,” and “User Labor Markup Language (ULML).”

Also I am happy to announce that my work will be featured in the Neuberger Museum exhibition New Media: Why in March 2009.

* Image above is a shot from MYPOCKET Transaction Graph.

After today’s bailout rejection and the big stock market drop, I checked out the full red Map of the Market, there was one spot still green, guess what: gold (Barrick Gold ABX). It is time to go back to make things, sell things, and count the money by hand.

* Click on the image to enlarge.

Last minute operation! After the Minitek show today, on Saturday night I will do another Meta-Control performance with Richie Hawtin at the Nocturnal Festival in LA. It will be at the Beatport Stage, see you if you are around. This time the Meta-Control pieces will be on a monster LED display, which looks something like the one in the image above (without the front rectangular screen).

Sep 12th, Friday at Minitek Festival, New York.
Penn Plaza, 401 7th avenue (between 33rd and 34th st) right in front of Madison Square Garden.
http://minitekfestival.com/innovation/night.html

This a 3 day party (12-14 Sep) of electronic music and art. I will perform three new pieces and new versions from the Meta-Control set (starting at 3am). Also Paul Prudence is performing on Saturday, Marius Watz is showing his Neon Organic, and James Patten is showing his super self-actuated table in the innovation pavilion.

Peter Kirn of CDM recently wrote about the event.

* Photo from the Meta-Control performance at TimeWarp 2007, Mannheim. In collaboration with Ali Demirel, performed with Richie Hawtin’s music.

A network diagram, or a graph, can be represented as text in many ways. We want it to be a structured text so that it can be read by computers. A graph is a set of objects called nodes or vertices connected by links called lines or edges depending on the context (physics, computer science, sociology etc.). The diagrams above are different examples of graphs. A basic representation of links between nodes could be written in this way:

john -> brent
brent -> amber
amber -> john

As you can tell this is a three person social triangle. The widely used graph visualization tool Graphviz uses this syntax, called the DOT language, to represent the basic network data (with semicolons at the end of each line). The DOT language can get quite complex for representing more detailed attributes of graphs.

In our Creative Networking course we started to draw imaginary network diagrams first by hand (see images from earlier workshops), then this week, we will translate them to structured text. We will use an XML file format called GraphML to represent the graph in text. We use this XML structure because it is web friendly, emerged as a standard by many contributions, easy to share, aka the ultimate man-machine readable data format.

GraphML is an easy-to-use XML format for graphs. It consists of a language core to describe the structural properties of a graph. Since it is XML, quite flexible for your application-specific needs. Its main features include support for directed, undirected, hierarchical and mixed graphs, also references to external data. Here is the graph above in basic GraphML:

<graph id="G">
    <edge source="john" target="brent">
    <edge source="brent" target="amber">
    <edge source="amber" target="john">
</graph>

We use XML-attributes (source=”something”, id=”1″, directed=”true” etc.) to declare graph properties such as directed, undirected, weight, or ID. To store extra data in the nodes and edges we use nested XML. Extra data declarations are called GraphML-attributes, which are defined with the <edge> tag. Also we can declare parser info for optimized parsing. You can learn more about GraphML, see how to, and examples here in GraphML Primer and GraphML Specification.

This week at the Creative Networking class we will study network topologies. That is the study of the arrangement or mapping of the elements (nodes, edges, etc.) of a network. I manually prepared GraphML data for each type of network topology that we will cover in the class. These images below are prepared by the Processing program that I prepared as a template for this class (will post it tomorrow after I clean it up the code). You can also grab the printable PDF version of the diagrams below.

Centralized, Decentralized

Centralized that is all nodes connect to a single node, a hub. It is hierarchical. Single authority. No cross-linking on the periphery nodes. Decentralized network is the multiplication of centralized networks. Many hubs, each with its own dependent nodes.

• centralized.xml
• decentralized.xml

Distributed, Tree

A distributed network has no central hubs. It is a mesh. Every node is autonomous. Multiple routes to go from one node to the other. A tree is obviously hierarchical, each node has multiple children, but only one parent. No cross-linking between branches.

• distributed.xml
• tree.xml

Dense, Sparse

Highly connected v. loosely connected.

• dense.xml
• sparse.xml

Core-periphery, Fully Connected

Core-periphery networks are highly interconnected in the middle and sparse on the edges, few connections from periphery to the core. In a fully connected all the nodes connected to every other node. My friend Ali Miharbi once said that a football team’s 11 members during a match can be considered as a fully connected network.

• coreperiphery.xml
• fullyconnected.xml

“Small World”, “Scale-Free”

Social network analyst Stanley Milgram coined the term Small World to describe tight clusters connected to other clusters with a few bridges. Scale-free network as defined by Albert-László Barabási, is the network whose degree distribution follows a power law. In such networks few nodes have large number of connections, some nodes have moderate connectivity, and many nodes have very few connections.

• smallworld.xml
• scalefree.xml

The relationship between form and text in art today somehow inherit in the relationship between data and code. When the data is relational so that it makes a graph, how do we approach it in the context of the arts? This is what we study in the Creative Networking course.

This fall I am teaching a course called Creative Networking at the New York University Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). It is an introduction to complex networks within the context of the arts. It focuses on understanding the structure and dynamics of large-scale networks and expanding the individual’s thinking about the network as a creative medium.

The course has 2 phases: Network Structure and Network Dynamics. The first phase focuses on networks as static entities. It is based on the Graph Theory and concerned with the structure. The second phase focuses on the processes taking place in the networks. It is concerned with time, interaction, and multiple characteristics of the network elements.

See the full syllabus here:
http://blog.burak-arikan.com/courses/creative-networking/

Also see the related workshops we’ve done at the ITU, MIT/VAP, and RISD:
http://teaching.burak-arikan.com/creative-networking/

I decided to look at what kind of interest groups emerge as I cure my Twitter social graph. Do my Twitter friends have always growing interconnections? How do people relate? Do I have friends who link together otherwise disconnected communities of interest? Do my Twitter clusters expand or contract over time?

Like the Amazon book network research I did earlier, I was inspired by Valdis Krebs’s network analysis research. Particularly in his recent post, Krebs did an analysis of his Twitter map, where he compared a low-res information visualization work TwitterWheel, with his diagram created in InFlow network analysis software. InFlow diagram is simple but rich, you understand more at a glance. Whereas TwitterWheel stands as a good example of info-viz-kitsch.

I used the graph layout program I developed earlier for the Amazon book network research. But this time no manual data collection, I grabbed all the friends data from the Twitter API. I collected my friends data at three different times to be able to compare the diagrams in time. Click on the images below to enlarge.

My Twitter Graph Week 1

Three weeks ago I was following 80 people. Laying out only the interconnections within the friends (removing my self), we see 6 clusters. By looking at the people I know here, I label them as “MIT”, “silicon valley”, “web programming”, “generative art”, “Istanbul”, and “web business tr (Turkey)”. The silicon valley cluster is large and dense compared to others. The MIT cluster is almost like a clique (every person connected to every other). Generative art is quite close to Silicon Valley, mostly bridged through the user neb. Obviously the Turkish web business cluster has many connections to the Silicon Valley, techcrunch being a major bridge here. The web programming cluster is very small, surprisingly it is connected to Silicon Valley only through the user al3x, who works at Twitter. After this first diagram, I decided to weave more web programmers, generative artists, and people I know from Istanbul. Also I removed neb, al3x, Scobleizer, TechCrunch to have less Silicon Valley weather news.

My Twitter Graph Week 2

Second week, I follow 118 people and the diagram is more hairy. Generative art, web programming, and the MIT clusters are now larger. Istanbul intensifies because of the growing interconnections and it pulls the web business tr after it lost a few Silicon Valley bridges. Now Silicon Valley has a little child called SNA (Social Network Analysis), a separate cluster emerged after I started to follow judithd. Also jeresig between web programming and Silicon Valley, and darita between generative art and Istanbul emerge as major bridges. After the second diagram I decided to weave more people from the field of network analysis, and decided to find more “net art” people.

My Twitter Graph Week 3

Third week, I follow 158 people, more bridges, more dense clusters. The new SNA cluster becomes larger, zephoria being at the center, and stands slightly away from Silicon Valley. A new cluster emerges on the top left, I call it “media/net art”. It is loosely interconnected, and the major magnets weaving the network are manovich, twhid, netwurker, and artfagcity. Media/net art cluster emerged from the extensions of MIT, Silicon Valley, and generative art. Also now between MIT, generative art, and Istanbul there are more bridges, and they are getting closer. toxi keeps his position at the center of the generative art. Interestingly serial_consign emerged as a major bridge between generative art and the new “media/net art” clusters. Silicon Valley and generative art are more away from each other.

Here is a movie showing the force-directed-graph layout program and me interacting to find who is who. Sorry for the crappy compression of Vimeo.

My Twitter Graph Week 3 from arikan on Vimeo.

Over the three weeks I intentionally separated strategic bridges to the Silicon Valley cluster. I was curious. The question is why do generative art, SNA, and media/net art clusters are highly pulled by the Silicon Valley? Another question, a meta question is, do these people mind about what these diagrams reveal about their privacy, while all the data is public?

Of course these clusters are my interpretation, they can be more crsytallized, more generalized, or named differently. Networks as static structures do not tell us much and never reflect the reality, however networks as systems evolving over time is quite helpful to understand the dynamics of living systems. Overall these diagrams help me cure my Twitter network better.

After reading The Social Life of Book, a visual analysis of the Amazon book network by the SNA researcher Valdis Krebs, I decided to do look at the surrounding network of the books that I am interested in.

I did the analysis on the two books that had big impact on me: “Design By Numbers” by John Maeda and more recently “The Shock Doctrine” by Naomi Klein. I started to trace the network out one and two steps from the focus book. As Krebs asked in his analysis, I was interested in the questions “How do these books relate?”, “What themes would I see in the surrounding network?”, “Will the book end up in the center of one massively interconnected cluster?”, “Will it end up linking together otherwise disconnected communities of interest?”

After manually collecting the data from Amazon, I added them into an XML structure and then in Processing wrote a basic force-directed graph algorithm to layout the network. Nodes pull or push in relation to each other, highly connected ones are stronger. I added some features like incoming connection count, which affects the pulling force (circle size represents the number of incoming connections). Click on the images below to enlarge.

“Design By Numbers” graph

In this graph we see clusters with themes ranging from computational design to sustainability to contemporary art to network culture. Design By Numbers is at the center of highly interconnected cluster of computational design, which also includes books such as Designing Interactions (has the most incoming connections), Processing Handbook, Visualizing Data, Physical Computing, and John’s recent book The Laws of Simplicity (the second highly connected). In the periphery of this cluster we see Everyware and Shaping Things, which act as bridging ties to other clusters. Everyware is bridging both the network theory and the sustainability cluster to computational design. Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things, not suprisignly, is in between computational design and sustainability. The sustainibility cluster is of course very close to the architecture cluster, in fact the bridging tie is Bruce Mau’s Massive Change. As you may know Bruce Mau collaborated with architect Rem Koolhaas in many projects including the rock solid SMLXL book. Koolhaas’s other collaborator is the building structure genius Cecil Balmond, who is the author of Informal. Well you can keep following these relationships forever. From the computational design and the architecture clusters, it is visible, and probably quite natural, that readers follow the professional and academic relationships between authors.

The recent MoMA Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition catalogue includes projects both in the field of computational design and architecture. Containing some Olafur Eliasson catalogues (names invisible), this group makes a little science-art cluster; and connects to Clay Shirky’s new book Here Comes Everybody in the network culture cluster. Here the central topic is complex networks, however the books are about different aspects of this complexity. We have books talking about the architecture of the networked society, economics, business, cultural and political critique. Interestingly between the network theory cluster and the computational design cluster there is an ironic book called Presentation Zen (name not visible, the one that connects Shirky’s book to Visualizing Data and Processing Handbook).

Contemporary art cluster at the bottom left has many artist and art theory books. The book Participation connects to The Exploit, Galloway and Thacker’s new book in the network theory. Together with Alex Galloway’s other book Protocol they are actually pulled by art theory. If we go deeper in the data collection we can probably see these two books getting more closer to the art theory cluster.

A few structural holes are interesting here. There seems to be no connection between contemporary art and computational design, at least in this collection. Any books you know that can connect these two clusters? Also there seems to be a structural hole between sustainability and science-art clusters. Don’t we have art about sustainability, sustainability art, or maybe “sustainable art”? MoMa exhibition seems like connecting architecture and network theory, but it is more than a few steps. I’d like to know more about possible weavers between architecture and network theory.

“The Shock Doctrine” graph

This graph ended up in two major clusters with themes globalization/finance and political/economic critique. The Shock Doctrine is in the larger cluster on the right. It has the most incoming connections followed by The End of America, The Conscience of a Liberal, and Broken Government. Together they make the center of this cluster, that is critical analysis. Whereas on the periphery, there are books that sound more like conspiracy theories (haven’t read though).

Globalization / finance cluster mostly contains neoliberal books as you can tell from the names. I started to read the recent best seller Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World and George Soros’s The New Paradigm of Financial Markets. These two books have more shared readers than the others in this group.

These two clusters are representing different political views, we can probably say neoliberals and leftists; and what bridges them is another ironic book called Bad Money…

To start with, I’ve added a MYPOCKET widget on the side bar. It shows what I buy everyday, and what will I buy next day. Yes you can always find future here, at least my future, before it happens.

Then I updated the typography, colors, link style, fonts size, and layout proportions. Back to defaults in colors, I used WC3’s web accessibility standard colors this time. Links #0000EE and underlined, visited links #552299. You’ve probably tried the search box logo before, if not do not hesitate to type your own name in the text box. Also did some background action, put the satellite picture of the most hated Incirlik U.S. army base in Turkey (map), this is by now the largest U.S. nuclear weapon base in Europe. Guess why?

I updated the blog to the new WordPress 2.6. Long waited plugin auto-update feature works really well. The editor is more stable. I like the new word count feature, this post is 391 words. It makes more sense in the post-Twitter world.

Cleaned up my drafts, deleted some of them, updated the titles. Now there are just 4-5 planned posts. I use these drafts like a notebook, paste things randomly, then go over them, and build into a post depending on my motivation. Sometimes a Twitter discussion can turn into a blog post, you never know.

I’ve been using Twitter more often. I gather some time related data from my online activity, I will write about it in a future post, planned in those 4-5 drafts. Added a twitter widget on the side, which posts the new entries to Twitter and shows my tweets here.

The Delicious widget has been flaky since the new version, which I don’t like. I am looking for an alternative, a more sincere social bookmarking system. The only reason I use delicious is that I have friends and people I admire who share bookmarks. No other reason really, if we all decide to move somewhere else, I am not going to think a second.

You can find more social web services I use in the Machine Readables list on the sidebar.

Ok cutting here. Got to work on the other posts.

After The Net is a deliberately ambiguous title: implying that somehow the Net is over in terms of its utopian promises and also making a reference to the documentary film The Net by Lutz Dammbeck (2003). Like the film, the exhibition explores systems of technological control and presents works that draw attention to historical shifts of network power: from cybernetics to free and open source software, and in turn to social networking platforms.

Artists and Contributors: Caen Botto (Universomente), Wayne Clements, Geff Cox (for project.arnolfini), Lutz Dammbeck, Jeff Gompertz, Rui Guerra, Linda Hilfling, Chun Lee, Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk (GOTO10), José Antonio Orts, and selected artists from openKURATOR: Burak Arikan, Bestiario, Carlos Katastrofsky, Abe Linkoln, Jimpunk and Mrtamale, Joseph Nechvatal, Cyril de Vroom and Jos Wabeke.

Pictures and documentation will be available at the Kurator website by next week.

Today bloggers discuss comment ownership. They are debating whether comments should belong to the blog/service or to the commenter. Ironically the meat of the discussion is in the comment threads. Rob La Gesse deletes his FriendFeed account (all comments disappear), Robert Scoble declares that he owns his comments, Mathew Ingram asks if Scoble owns his comments, Hank Williams calls for a comment copyright mechanism, Fred Wilson points to Disqus, Disqus posts “Commenter Bill of Rights”, Josh Catone asks who owns your comment, does it matter where you leave them?

We all know who owns the comments. Comments belong to the person who writes them. The question for us is how much are our comments worth?

When you write a note in Delicious it propagates to FriendFeed, to Facebook, to Twitter, then to other social places on the web. Do you currently own it? No. Does your comment attract visitors and in turn generate ad revenue? Yes. Do you get anything from the ad revenue? No. What do they say? “In return you are getting the service for free”. Are you really getting a worthy service for all your comments, votes, photos, bookmarks, videos, and all your invaluable social connections? Think about it.

What we need is open contribution metrics at any service. To be able to debate on how much we give to a social web service and how much we get in turn, we have to be aware of the amount of our contribution.

User Labor Markup Language (ULML) is created because of this issue. ULML is an open data structure to outline the metrics of user participation in social web services. Our aim is to construct criteria and context for determining the value of user labor for distribution. We believe that universality, transparency, and accessibility of user labor metrics will ultimately lead to more sustainable service cycles in social web.

* Images above are shots from a sketch based on a cell packing algorithm in the Meta-Control series.

Today my RSS reader NetNewsWire reseted itself, I lost all the feeds (500+) I’ve been collecting in the past years. I don’t know what happened, but all I get was the default feed list: mac.com, BBC, Wired etc. First of all, I said bye to NetNewsWire and removed it from my computer. Although I like its clean and fast interface, I can’t take this serious error.

Then I started to look for new feed readers.

Google Reader. Well I use it sometimes, but it is very slow for my reading. Also it manages the feed list really badly. For example, it uses RSS icon after RSS icon to represent the feeds, very bad. I can’t scan them easily. I think Google Reader developers are just lazy, why not just use feeds’ own 16×16 icons like many other readers do. Share, share with a note, star, tag are necessary for large-scale conversations (Greg Smiths’s post). But these features overlap with the services I already effectively use: Del.icio.us, Twitter, etc.

Attensa. Works quite fast, but it has a poorly designed visual interface that I don’t want to stare at much. Attensa’s AttentionStream technology combines content (e.g, authors, titles, tags) with your attention to provide a relevancy ranking. Sounds exciting but the interface does not surface this “underlying” technology well. Place of the numbers, color saturation, contrasts, and font size are all poorly composed I think. It may get better if I use it more, but current prioritized lists are not relevant to my interests. If you do machine learning, please show it, show the progress, what you learn about me.

NewsGator. Slow and poor information design. It has some filtering through AideRSS, which ranks feed items based on comments, Del.icio.us history, Diggs, Tweets, etc. But this filtering does not make much sense to me, because the popularity based ranking models can not match my diverse interests well. Also I read my favorite feeds just in time, so as a paradox, items are probably being ranked after I read them.

Fav.or.it. Tried a little bit, its interface is just confusing. Too much unnecessary information here and there. Comment reading is good. Integration with existing sharing services (Del.icio.us, Twitter etc.) is good. Reading experience is bad.

FeedEachOther. Many features, poor information design. Comment reading good, friend connection good, feed list (OPML) sharing good, readability bad. I don’t care much about feed recommendations, because I already find interesting and related feeds as I use the web. Again locked in sharing, no integration with existing services.

There are many readers out there, these are the ones that I found interesting enough to give it a try. There are also custom home pages (Netvibes, iGoogle, Live.com etc.) that act as readers, I just can’t touch those at all. Every reader has one or two unique feature that is good, but none of the readers is good enough to help me deal with the complex information flows. If you use something good, please post it in the comments. For now, I think I will stop reading feeds.

Update: Checking some of the console based unix feed readers on this list.
http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/i_want_the_mutt_of_feed_readers.html

* Images above are shots from a sketch based on a flocking algorithm that I was playing with recently.

User Labor Markup Language (ULML), is an open data structure to outline the metrics of user participation in social web services. Our aim is to construct criteria and context for determining the value of user labor for distribution. We believe that universality, transparency, and accessibility of user labor metrics will ultimately lead to more sustainable service cycles in social web.

Please see the examples on the User Labor website. Your feedback and contribution is very important to improve this project.

http://userlabor.org/

User Labor was first implemented in Meta-Markets.com, the online stock market for social web labor (learn more about Meta-Markets). Below image is a screenshot of my profile page on Meta-Markets. By clicking on the “View User Labor” link any Meta-Markets user can see how much work I’ve done at Meta-Markets in the ULML xml format (will be displayed as a chart soon).

Also see Engin Erdogan’s “Happy User Labor Day”blog post.

More info here.

Update: Unfortunately the party was shut down by the police. Devrim Kadirbeyoglu shot and edited a 4 min video (police at the end):