My goal for the day was to geotag the mongage images I uploaded last week. Luckily each image title contains the latitude and longitude of the camera so I extracted the data from the title and added it back in the image tags.

Here is what I did:

1. Got a Flickr API key and authentication code from the Flickr services website.
2. Installed Beej’s Python Flickr API.
   1. Downloaded and extracted archive.
   2. Called python setup.py build.
   3. Called python setup.py install.
   4. Edited flickrapi.py to properly call firefox from the Windows command line (added double quotes around the URL in validateFrob).
3. Wrote a python script to extract the title, parse it, and upload the new tags (I started with the test script Beej provides).
   1. It took a while to realize I needed to include both the method and auth_token parameters for the photo.setLocation and photo.addTags methods.

I have seen a number of claims lately that “humans work best in groups of 150 people”:http://www.commonsenseadvice.com/human_cortex_dunbar.html.

The above article leaves some questions in my mind:

* How do you determine group membership (does one email exchange cause someone to be a member of my group)?

* I am currently a member of about 4 or 5 distinct social groups… is this bad for my brain?

* Is 150 the most that I should know? Or is it the largest a non-hierarchichal organization can be? Or is it the largest a leaf of a hieararchy can be?

Researchers from Penn State find that teens “prefer IM to email”:http://www.corante.com/many/20030501.shtml#34215 (via “MANY-TO-MANY”:http://www.corante.com/many/).

From this result many will leap to the conclusion that adults will soon prefer IM in all situations… this will not happen!

For teens, IM is replacing the telephone as a primary means of distance communication. Adults have more diverse communication requirements than teens. In many cases adults are using email instead of memos in the workplace to communicate decisions.

Fundamentally, the reasons for sending a memo are different from those for making a phone call. Adults have more situations in which sending a memo makes more sense than making a phone call.

Email is a good memo replacement for a number of reasons:

* easy to record a decision for posterity (in case it turns out to be a bad one).

* broadcast communication is easy

* email can be ignored (postponing decision making)

* email can be forwarded to a higher authority (since they are often self-contained and succinct)

IM is acceptable for teens because they almost never need any of the above features.

Over the years I have been involved in a number of self-proclaimed structureless groups (like mizzou ultimate frisbee). As a result these communities have consistently backslide from all major achievents and improvements. This backsliding occurs (in my opinion) as the result of the power vacuum (and loss of direction) created by the loss of major decision makers.

The Tyranny of Structurelessness (a fantastic article via many-to-many) rings true with my personal experience.

If the movement is to move beyond these elementary stages of development, it will have to disabuse itself of some of its prejudices about organisation and structure. There is nothing inherently bad about either of these. They can be and often are misused, but to reject them out of hand because they are misused is to deny ourselves the necessary tools to further development. We need to understand why ’structurelessness’ does not work.

For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit. The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this can only happen if they are formalised.

I have seen many of the “Principles of Democratic Structuring” applied but never in an open and obvious way.

This is a must read for anyone wanting to improve a structureless group.

As it currently works “reversible.org”:http://reversible.org will fail. It will “collapse”:http://reversible.org/sucks. It will be filled with “worthless spam”:http://reversible.org/spam and posts by people desperate for hits (like myself). Without a mechanism to determine the quality of a referrer this problem will continue. It depends too much on the individual (the content producing individual) to determine the quality of the content. It does not allow for intelligent refactoring that a Wiki would allow.

And adding content is much easier than with a Wiki… Wiki’s work because newbies generally cannot figure out how to add content (they have to read a manual). With “reversible”:http://reversible.org any chump with a web site can post a link… hmmm… maybe that is the solution. Use the count from each referrer to determine quality and cull the weaklings.

But the problem remains of URL permanence remains. An existing link to reversible will not change simply because the “powers that be”:http://reversible.org/people/ want to refactor the hierarchy. The best solution will likely involve a complex set of referrer rules… if this process could be automated or at least assisted by a nice UI that would be pretty cool…

In summary:

Any system like this (a content aggregator) without editorial control (distributed or centralized) will soon become worthless. The same thing will happen to “the topic exchange”:http://www.topicexchange.com.

That said, I really like experiments like this and I am glad that there are folks out there innovating. Keep up the good work.

Update: Looks like they have added filtering and sorting by referrer count. This should help things.