musings of a social architect

Joi Ito: Human Router

I first met Joi Ito in 1994, at a party thrown by his sister Mimi and her husband Scott. A few days later, Joi came to visit Scott & myself at the Paramount Technology Lab, where we were working at the time. Joi seemed to know everyone in the media/technology biz, and took great delight in figuring out who I should make contact with, and getting me hooked up.

I find it fascinating that Joi's Blog so clearly reflects his basic nature as a 'human router' - a person who's mission in life is to bring people together and foster connections between them. Whenever I run into Joi on various social network services, he's always incredibly well-connected -- which brings ME more connections in a tangible and visible way.

Experiencing Joi in these different yet consistent ways makes me hopeful that bottom-up social systems can help us build online social identities that are true to the deep nature of who we are. There's something about the sum of the parts - all the different pieces of identity we develop using these various tools - that reveals our basic nature as human beings.

What do you think? Do you feel that your online social identity reflects your true nature?

Bottom-up Social Systems

While researching an upcoming talk about self-organizing social systems, I ran across this excellent article about the data-driven, bottom-up nature of today's social software. A good read.

I'm fascinated by the underlying dynamics of bottom-up, data-driven social systems, including:
1) decentralized (vs. centralized) control
2) member-created (vs. staff-created) content
3) statistical (vs. editorial) ranking & classification systems

As I look around the Web, I frequently see bottom-up dynamics in successful products. Google's success is based on leveraging social information in the form of links created by people, and it's flagship products are scalable, self-organizing systems. Blogs, Wikis and social network products like Friendster, LinkedIn, Tribes, Ryze, Spoke, etc. follow these self-organizing principles as well.

Links are the atomic units of the web - and leveraging links seems like a smart data-mining strategy for online self-organizing systems.