Pawns via Creative Commons/Flickr.

“It’s overwhelming, fantastic, and like all technological marvels,” says Damon Horowitz, “just a little bit amusing.”

Just a week ago Google bought Horowitz’s social search start-up Aardvark for a reported $50 million. The price is one the company co-founder will neither confirm nor deny. What he will allude to though is that now that they’re under the Google umbrella, Aardvark-style “social search” will attempt to integrate across the company’s ever expanding offerings.

If you’re familiar with Aardvark let your imagination run for a moment and consider how the platform can turbo-boost Google Buzz which was also, and perhaps serendipitously, released last week.

If you’re not familiar with Aardvark — and since it only launched a public beta last October, there’s no reason you should be — a basic primer runs something like this.

Aarvark is a free service that lets those of us puzzled about life’s quandaries ask our social network for answers to our questions. These range from the mundane, “Anyone have a tailor they trust to alter suits near the 1 line in Manhattan?,” to the possibly profound, “How would you figure out how many cats there are in the US that are named Gary?”

More often than not, a response comes within a few minutes.

“We think of Aardvark like a contact who should be available everywhere, through your existing communication channels,” says Horowitz.

Limits of AI

Damon Horowitz explains Artificial Intelligence’s inherent limits and how humans and machines can play nice together — TEDx SoMa 2010.

Questions can be asked through Vark.com, mobile apps, email or instant messenger and the beauty of it all is that responses are contextual. Answers are, after all, coming from people within your social graph. The benefit of social search is the human touch, real responses from real people.

“Aardvark is great when you want to get an answer from a person right away, and you don’t want to try to hunt through a bunch of web pages yourself,” Horowitz explains. “Often we don’t want static information from the web, but a personal answer to our specific question — we want someone to hear our question, understand our context, and share their relevant experience.”

By connecting into existing social circles such as those we have via Facebook and Twitter, Aardvark scans our social graph for those who have similar backgrounds, sensibilities and interests. Send Aardvark a question and the service surveys our first circle of connections and then friends of friends.

Like Twitter, Aardvark should be thought of as a utility rather than a Web application or destination site. Whether it’s Aardvark that succeeds or another company like it, giving people the ability to leverage their social graph to intelligently ask and answer questions across any connected device will increasingly become part of the Internet’s plumbing.

Aardvark’s leveraging of the vast amounts of social, geographic and overall data sloshing through the Web and reconstructing it into a useful utility demonstrates an overall shift in the Internet’s evolution. There’s even a name being promoted to describe the trend. It’s called the Synaptic Web.

In His Own Words

Khris Loux explains the Synaptic Web at the Defrag Conference 2009.

“The Synaptic Web is a set of observations about how the Web is forming,” says Khris Loux, CEO of Echo and proponent of the concept. “As the speed, flexibility and complexity of connections on the Web increase exponentially, the Internet is increasingly beginning to resemble a biological analog; the human brain.”

The metaphor here is that all our information and actions are pings firing across the Internet much like synapses firing in a brain. A single ping doesn’t do much in an of itself but multiply to scale with the billions and billions of social actions people are committing online and you have the beginnings of a pulsating, thinking ecosystem.

Microsoft’s Photosynth is a Synaptic Web example, says Loux. By taking the discrete photos taken by the crowd, combining them with geographic data and mixing them through — and analyzing them with — very smart code, whole new images and ways to explore spaces are created.

“Photosynth,” Loux explains, “is clear proof that patterns exist and meaning can be discerned without the need for active coordination between users.”

What he’s talking about is a meta-web, a place that isn’t so much sites and HTML pages but instead human connections augmented by the machine.

Horowitz has worked on these problems for a while now. His background is in Artificial Intelligence and philosophy. What he concluded though is that trying to get the machine to think and act like a human is a bit of a fool’s errand. Instead, we should be harnessing the machine to increase connections between people and leverage human intelligence.

“Machines do well at processing large quantities of information — they are great at fast indexing, numerical analysis, pattern recognition and such,” says Horowitz. “Humans deal well with context — they are naturally adept at understanding other humans, at sharing subjective experiences, thinking through ideas, and helping each other out.

When the Web was born some twenty years ago, it was a publishing mechanism. If you learned some HTML you could put up a page and broadcast your thoughts. Everyone became a publisher.

When the Web was reborn as Web 2.0, everyone became a commentator. The read/write Web has been a participatory experience. You write, I comment. You post, we share.

Facebook built an empire on this read/write model and while it and Twitter are now part of social media vernacular, Aardvark — despite its aquisition by Google — is still under the radar.

This is a shame. Where else can you get answers to life’s questions in under five minutes, a claim Aardvark legitimately makes.

“I know this ‘we sit on top of all your other social information online’ approach isn’t yet a fully established paradigm,” Horowitz says, “but I think everything is moving that way.”

The change is tectonic and while tectonic change comes imperceptibly at first, Internet time moves quite fast. Five years ago seems ancient in the Web world, just as five years from now 2010 will appear quite quaint.

About Aardvark and the Synaptic Web

This article originally appeared on ScribeMedia.org.

Please visit the original to rant, rave or otherwise discuss.

Run time: ~ 12:30

Danish law allows people to make copies of DVDs for personal use.

However, Danish also law criminalizes disabling Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies that prevent people from making their legal copies personal copies.

Got that? A contradiction.

Enter Henrik Anderson.

The Danish citizen made personal copies of 100 DVDs and told the anti-copyright group Antipiratgruppen all about it. He asked that they take him to court so they could figure out the law. The group’s lawyers never got back to him so he reported himself to the police.

As TorrentFreak writes:

In order to force his government’s hand on laws which allow him to copy DVDs for his own personal use, but forbid him to remove the DRM in order to do so, he decided to turn himself in…

…”I’ve started this because I don’t want to be a criminal.”

The full story about how to illegally make legal copies of a private DVD collection is available via TorrentFreak

As Charles Sumner said at the time:

“This glorious invention was vouchsafed to mankind that we might salute and converse with one another respectively stationed at remote and isolated points for a nominal sum.”

But instead, he continued, “A wicked monopoly has seized hold of this beneficent capacity and design, and made it tributary, by exorbitant tariffs, to a most miserly and despicable greed.”

So quotes Matthew Lasar in a brief, eye-opening account of US battles over control of the telegraph or — with a steampunk wink and nod — the “Victorian Internet.”

When juxtaposed against current Network Neutrality debates it should give pause to the argument that we hand over the keys to future Internet growth and development to the Verizons, Time Warners, and Comcasts operating today.

Take a trip down Lasar’s memory lane and you see how Western Union’s monopoly controlled the telegraph by throttling competition, and curried political favor by disrupting opposition party information and communication.

In turn, the Associated Press struck a deal with Western Union and agreed, as Lasar writes, that they would never “encourage or support any opposition or competing Telegraph Company.” With that that relationship in their pocket, the AP went on it own merry way and crushed competing news and information organizations that were beginning to crop up around the country.

You could argue that the telegraph and the Internet are apples and robots, but the similarities between media consolidation and desired control over information access between now and then are clear.

Lasar’s evocative article is available via Ars Technica.

How do we act on social networks? How should we act on social networks?

What is the best way to leverage the branding, marketing and communications possibilities provided by social networking tools?

Faris Yakob, Chief Technology Strategist, McCann-Erickson New York, has a surprisingly simple answer: Be Nice, Or Leave.

It’s a simple dictum, one that he takes from our social interactions in the “real” world and applies to our digital lives.

For example, it doesn’t take much social grace to understand you’re boorish if you perpetually interrupt conversations, shout others down, always talk about how great you are, or constantly fixate on just you and not on the community within which you exist and operate. Doing so is not the way to win friends and influence people despite how we see some brands and organizations acting online.

Through a number of examples, Faris discusses how the art of listening, communicating and most importantly, participating as an equal — albeit important — voice among many is a path towards increasing brand trust, transparency and influence.

The video above was filmed in Spring 2009. I think its insight will last much longer.

Mark Earls writes in Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature that traditional marketers completely misunderstood the mechanics of mass behavior. Instead of a direct relationship between brand and individual, our instinct is to look at what others around us are doing, using and possessing, and emulating that behavior.

Think the ubiquity of text messaging, the explosion of the Internet itself and the crowding of social networking sites: all examples of activities that entered daily activity not so much because of top down marketing, but because each lubricated the social interaction of those among us.

While the talk in the video above is about and for commercial brand managers and marketers, there are considerable lessons to be learned by the NGO, non-profit and governmental agency communities. This primarily includes how to inject ideas into the public sphere, have them take hold in the collective imagination and develop a life of their own.

Mike Smith led us this week with an excellent account of his experience in grass roots organizing during the Obama presidential campaign. More importantly — and if we listened well — he discussed how we might learn lessons from the campaign for future political advocacy whether that advocacy revolves around an election or the promotion of specific issues.

One of the key takeaways is to embrace potential allies and enable them to pursue their own online messaging in support of the issue at hand. This necessitates a relinquishing of top down control, and relinquishing such control is something many struggle with throughout all industries be they corporations, advocacy organizations, political campaigns or community organizers.

At issue, of course, is the actual message. What is it? How is it said and how is it presented? This is a classic case of who controls the messenger. In the parlance of the day, are there mechanisms to prevent others from going rogue? Or is that just the cost of doing business in the digital age?

The answer is not simple and the conversation about the answer is quite long. If we cut to the short of it though the answer is yes, no matter the vertical we need to give up our attempts to control every aspect of a brand or message and instead realize that we are a participant in an ever evolving conversation about it.

That the digital medium no longer allows top down control is not a new idea. However, many still struggle in their interactions with others who are engaging a message, and reinterpreting that message for their particular audience.

Our success in doing so is partly based on our ability to relinquish control while simultaneously maintaining active engagement with the interpretation of our message and the endless reinterpretation — and indeed misinterpretation — that is bound to take place.

How to actually do so will be tackled elsewhere. Let us now acknowledge it though and flag for later debate.

After Mike’s presentation we workshopped and tried to create grassroots campaigns that could affect a global issue (in this case, the climate change in Copenhagen). As we came out of that workshop and listened to what individual groups proposed, an interesting mix of online advocacy and physical world gathering was suggested.

While the offline advocacy was concrete (eg, we will hold events across the country and this is who we’ll target), online strategies remained somewhat vague. With each group’s presentation, we heard something along the lines of, “We’ll pursue social media, we’ll have a Web site.”

A Web site is all well and good, but to what end? What is this “social media” site that everyone leans towards and believes they must have?

I mentioned that these hypothetical sites do not need to include much. Some media around the advocacy is important. Updates for targeted communities are also important. But in the role playing we pursued the general consensus was that traditional in-person events still trump virtual communications in our efforts to engage audience support.

So where does that leave an organization’s Web site and, by extension, Internet strategy?

In this case, with others. That is, to hand our message over to advocates in the blogosphere and let them run with it.

This requires a number of important qualities, namely authenticity and transparency so that Bloggers will believe enough in your story to run it, promote it, and engage with it as they engage their Web audiences.

Equally important, it requires that after demonstrating your authenticity you accept that your idea and mission is “out there” for interpretation, manipulation and sometimes, unfortunately, condemnation.

The idea here is that you’ve put your idea, mission, thought or brand into the public and you will receive both feedback and backlash. This is important. This is expected. This is what you must navigate to be successful. At least, this is what you need to navigate to succeed in the online space.

All of which is a very long way to get to the video that starts this post: CarrotMobs.

Each cluster working on our climate change exercise advocated in-person and event oriented action. I suggested Carrot Mob techniques and the video above gives a good sense of what those may be, and how they could be engaged.

The point is rather simple, and the Jujutsu (柔術) should be clear. Take your target’s greatest strength and turn it to your advantage.

I’m interested in hearing how you can advocate and get those you target to come on board with your message.

I’m doubly interested in whether you’re willing to pass your advocacy message along to the digital world, and then engage it as it transforms, or wanders off in directions you may not have planned for.

When we talk about Internet and mobile communications, we should always keep in mind that in many parts of the world these technologies just don’t compute.

Take, for example, the video above from Liberia’s capital Monrovia. Here, where per capita GDP is $215, newspapers are too expensive to buy and Internet access is something the majority only hear about.

How to share and spread information then? The Chalkboard Blog.

Each morning, Alfred Sirleaf combs through the day’s news and writes headlines and stories on a giant chalkboard. Then readers come to discuss, debate in this newly formed town square. Call it the world’s least likely, most popular blog.

What’s amazing though in this video is how Sirleaf discusses design and technology issues associated with the medium. It’s a conversation any news editor can appreciate.

A different video on this can be seen here.

Called The Curious Case of Jia Junpeng, or The Power of Symbolic Appropriation in Chinese Cyberspace, the essay is taken from a talk given by Guobin at a conference earlier this month on how memes spread in China.

As Leonard summarizes:

Yang tells the story of how a single 12-character message — “Jia Junpeng, your mother wants you to go home to eat” — posted to an online forum frequented mainly by bored gamers frustrated with delays in the rollout of World of Warcraft in China, became a viral sensation — attracting 7 million hits and 300,000 comments in one day — that received widespread coverage from Chinese media.

Both are worth the read.

Guobin’s piece is here.

Leonard’s is here.