New times are under development for changemod.

Blogging is a productive, thought-provoking experience; but it is also a time consuming experience. To blog does not only mean to write. It also means interacting, reading and participating.

This blog came to life within my Master Thesis and I find it hard to continue writing now that my studies are finished.

This means, that the changemod blog will remain online, but will be updated seldom.

Stay tuned though, because changemod will reinvent itself behind a new facade.

I just finished reading Barry Schwartz’s book “the paradox of choice; why more is less“.

The author suggests, that the more choices people have the more complicated it becomes for them to make a choice.

The popular series of studies “When choice is demotivating” [downloadable as *.pdf here] speaks for Schwartz’s argumentation.

In one of these studies, the researchers set up a display featuring a line of high-quality jams for customers to taste. If a customer boughta jar she would receive an one dollar coupon. I one condition of the study, the display had a variety of only 6 jams while on another condition there was a set of 24 varieties available.

Although the large array attracted more customers it only convinced the 3% of the customers to actually buy a jar. On the contrary 30% of the customers bought a jar from the small array.

The explanations for the results of this and other similar studies vary:

• a large array of options may discourage consumers because it forces an increase in the effort in making a decision.

• a large array of options reduces the attractiveness of the product.

Barry Schwartz examines the subject of choice by concentrating on 4 major subjects:

1. What drives people to choose

2. How do people choose

3. Why do people suffer from vast options

4. How can people stop suffering from choice

Choosing not to choose

The paradox of choice can be applied to many fields of our life and the virtual world is also included.

The number of blogs and sites which constitute the web is certainly overloading people, which in the end conclude on reading the big hubs and refrain from searching and choosing.

It is a fact, that I also notice in the way I surf the web lately.

I have chosen 3 social sites and a small number of blogs to follow and am no longer interested in searching for new possibilities. I prefer to settle with lesser quality, than striving to find the perfect resources.

I guess I’m what Barry Schwartz describes as a satisficer:

If you’re a satisficer, the number of available options need not have a significant impact on your decision making. When you examine an object and its good enough to meet your standards, you look no further; thus, the countless other available choices become irrelevant.

On the other hand though, there are also the maximizers:

Maximizers need to be assured that every purchase or decision was the best that could be made. Maximizers seek and accept only the best.

Anyway, this subject has drawn my attention lately; I’ve already written a post at pandemicBlog inspired by the book and will return with at least one more.

I finished developing the design for the Game Philosophy Conference.

The look and feel is not my work - I just did the coding. It is a simple site concentrating on content. See it in action at gamephilosophy.org

You can download the xhtml version here. Its features include:

• valid xhtml transitional

• valid CSS 2.1

• GNU GPL Licence

There is also a wordpress version here, if you’re interested.

It is not built for daily posts and typical blogging usage. Instead it uses the Content Management features of wordpress to easily update the body of the pages. It is basically meant for static pages, but with minor changes you can use it everywhere.

I’ve been lately very busy with several projects running at the same time. Result of this overload was, that I didn’t get the time to write any posts or even follow my subscriptions. When I opened my RSS Reader today, I had more than 500 articles waiting for me.

What I did to surpass this overload of information and work was to concentrate on specific services, blogs and aggregators. Sources, that I trust for the quality of information they provide.

Since social media have evolved in such a massive form of knowledge with no secure quality filter, information sources are mostly trusted individuals or niche social networks.

The return of the individual: FriendFeed & Toluu

One of the most popular services that puts the individual opinion at the center of attention is friendfeed.

A couple of days ago I joined a new invite-only service, which also concentrates on the power of the individual. Toluu lets you share your RSS feed with your friends. Instead of constantly reading the same blogs denying any diversity to your subscriptions (the RSS Curse) you can change once in a while by reading other feeds.

Although community plays an important role in Toluu, it is the role of the individual that gives the service meaning. You don’t need to have hundreds of friends, just some chosen few which you trust and share same interests.

In that sense, Toluu follows the basic principle behind FriendFeed.

For further information here are a couple of  interesting resources on Toluu:

• 10 Reasons why you are going to love Toluu

• An interview of the  Toluu founder

I still believe in the power of the collective intelligence. But correct aggregation of information is out of the question, when we are dealing with lack of diversity and biased opinions.

Lately it seems to me, that many social networks are in that position where information are chosen by the most connected and popular individuals.

Choosing your field of information: Get invited

As I noted above, I lately don’t have the time to scrouge through all these social networks, so I have decided to choose my battles.

I continue to be positively surprised by the quality of information in Twine. I’ve already given out more than 10 invitations, but magically the number of invitations at my hands increased.

So, if you’re interested in getting in Twine leave me a comment below and I’ll send you an invitation.

Toluu also provides to its members a limited number of invitations. I currently have only 3, so -again- if interested let me know.

And for those of you who scan the text and don’t actually read (which is fine by me) leave a comment if you want to:

• get invited in Twine (more than 10 invitations already given out)
• get invited in Toluu (3 invitations left)

A series of two posts has been published at pandemiclabs about blog posting.

1. The first one (how to attract more productive comments to your blog) has provoked an interesting discussion and suggestions. From surrealistic arguments on beer (!) by lago to a great tip from Nick about the intensedebate.com service.

2. On the second post about blogging, I argue about the negative effects of daily posts. It is a subject I currently experience first hand, since (as you might have noticed) I’m not posting that often lately.

Nonetheless the subscribers to my blog increase, although (naturally) the traffic has significantly fallen. In short I suggest, that daily posts may increase the traffic of the blog, but the subscribers will come once you don’t clutter their RSS Reader.

What happens when your time span becomes so narrow, that you can’t fit a couple of hours of social media browsing?

Which social media would you visit to check and submit latest news?

The problem of popular social media

I’m an active member of mixx and stumbleupon. I usually spend quite some time daily in these aggregators to read the latest news, socialize and submit worthy material. But April has been a busy month, so I don’t have time to concentrate on these social media.

I also noticed, that I really don’t have much reasons to spend much time in the popular social networks. Why?

• News usually iterate in other social media sites.
• Popular stories are not what I call news. Most of the time they are lists of firefox plugins, interesting pictures, comparisons of social media (mixx vs Digg) and so on. I enjoy that kind of news too, but in time shortage I prefer more “serious” news.
• They are a race of self-promotion. Either by self-submission, getting the right friends, commenting on the right article or promoting the popular-to-be post, self-promotion is sometimes in the back of our heads. Nothing wrong with that; but sometimes I want 100% objectivity.

How to surpass social media overload

So how can you surpass this problem? What do you do, when you are fed up with all these popular social media?

• Locate niche social aggregators. The popular social media sites are becoming complicated, full of all kinds of content and sometimes even unfriendly. I daily read Slashdot news. They are objective, interesting, serious and with great discussions.
• Build and constantly work on your feed. Having a steady RSS Feed is not enough. Delete once in a while some feeds and add new ones. Don’t have all the hubs (techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, etc.) in your Feed, their news usually overlap.
• Get FriendFeed. It’s individual based, so you can follow only the people you really trust. I follow only 4 persons - and it is more than enough.
• Jump on new, promising social media. I got in Twine some days ago and the service is great. Few people, communicating with personalized messages and submitting quality content. Did I mention it is semantic? I still have some invitations left, for those interested.

I’m starting to believe, that the next generation of social media will be individual based and not collectively powered. what do you think? Are you also getting this social media overload?

Couple of days ago I finally got my invitation to twine. Twine is one of the first semantic applications, which tries to

[...] organize, share and discover information about your interests, with networks of like-minded people.

Triplify (which I’m still trying to understand) and zemanta came along later.
At first sight twine looks like any other social network. You have your account, your connections (friends), your submissions, your groups and so on.
But actually twine is much more, something I noticed even during my short presence in the platform.
I’m not going to write an extensive review of twine, since most of you already know about the service.

I’ll just say, that the recommendations and tags used by twine are highly related with the user’s search and that the submissions are of very high quality and diversity.
If you don’t know about twine here are some extensive reviews:

The first Mainstream semantic app?

Twine launches a smarter way to organize your online life

Lately, there has been some criticism on twine also. I cannot say that I disagree with the points, but it seems to be a very promising and qualitative platform - at least in comparison to other social networks.

10 invitations

If you’re interested in subscribing to twine and giving it a try on your own, I have 10 invitations.

Contact me and I’ll invite you. Remember I only have 10 invitations, so the fastest ones will get invited.