So it’s time to get going again, and I am recharging the batteries. I love the smell and taste and buzz of coffee in the morning, and that’s what I’m currently enjoying. I need it too. It was a pleasantly messy evening. I always get lost here when I arrive, and then, later, in the evening, after I’ve soaked up the atmosphere, everything suddenly comes into focus - like an alternative reality.

Which was one of the sub-dominant themes of yesterday’s afternoon session. However, having mulled the afternoon session over, fed it, doused it with lager and then smoked it - like a kipper; and having then slept on it, and then woken it up again with 7 shots of powerful espresso, I’m thinking that it’s not about alternative realities at all. It’s about reality as a spectrum.

In the Q&A session after the four presentations, At least two of the four presenters provided further insight into what’s happening in online collaborative communities, the big social networks* that are the most obvious, or obviously succesful manifestation of how people are communing online.

The bottom line is that these communities as currently realised are limited and limiting. Matt Jones’ scorn for and concern about use of the term ‘friend’ for contact was echoed and amplified by Jyri Engstrom when he talked about humans exceeding their limits in terms of their ability to understand, let alone manage, the massive new availability of communities; the huge rise in the numbers of contacts within those burgeoning communities, and identities. It’s a human problem, and it’s a dual one: too many undifferentiated social spaces - over-supply of choices - that are simultaneously too limited in terms of what you can do and who you can be within them.

That’s why I like Addy Feuerstein’s AllofMe actually. It looks like an the opportunity to do a really comprehensive reality slice, in forensic detail, on one specific aspect of self in a very detailed multi-faceted way - the Summer of 87, for example. This would enable the expression of every aspect of self at that point - a detailed, exhaustive synchronic expression of everything. Which would be a tremendously rich, productive thing to do, I think, would address the variety and choice issues fully - particularly if you could then share and correlate other people’s similarly rich expressions of self.

It wouldn’t allow the desired vaiety and seamlessness of experience in the present reality, but it might explore and expose the detail of one section of reality, pointing towards how we might better explore and express the current structure of reality and how the online world can enhance and encourage greater, better, richer collaboration and community. The key is in the detail.

In the end, it was Philip Rosedale’s rambling idealism about a seamless parallelism between Second Life and The Real World that came closest to describing the scalable spectrum of reality  - even though Second Life is nowhere near achieving this.

The overarching theme of ‘How can we better create collaboratively in social contexts?’ is shaping up into a few big themes: among them, time and timing, reality and imagination, identity and communication, the need for a new vocabulary to describe emergent forms around all of these things… I’m getting pretty excited about where we are at online, about what happens next.

Which is pretty much on brand (exactly like Duncan in this picture) for PICNIC, which is where people gather to invent the future and then make it happen. Nice. Really looking forward to hearing Clay Shirky and Genevieve Bell talking about these later this morning.

 *Quote from someone I met at PICNIC last night, can’t remember who, just the sound of his voice and the sight of him baring his teeth: “Social networks? I never want to hear that fucking term ever again!”

I missed the next two sessions, checking on the delivery details for the print copy of LBiQ 4, which we’re distributing at PICNIC tomorrow and thenrunning into some friends on my way back to the hall. A pity - they both sounded pretty cool.

Artist Aaron Koblin talked about share-cropping sheep scrawlers, then Stefan Agamanilos reported on hot trends in communication. It says here.

I was back in conference in time for The Emerging real-Time Social Web, a moderated  presentation/discussion session. Jyri Engstrom, founder of Jaiku, Matt Jones, founder of Dopplr, Addy Feurstein, founder of AllofMe and Philip Rosedale, founder of second Life were moderated by Linda Stone, ‘visionary thinker and thought leader’.

I couldn’t blog it real time because of power failure. What my notes say is this:

Jyri Engstrom, on a parallel track to Charles Leadbetter earlier - a more attractive, simpler and more practical track, it has to be said - gave us three questions to ask about new online communities when they appear.

1. What is the social object around which the members or potential members of the community are gathering, or are supposed to gather? If it’s not obvious, you may have a problem.

2. What verbs should the members be utilising in order interact with the social object? Jyri used eBay as an example: ‘Buy’and ‘Sell’.

3. What are the nodal points where and when information and behaviour can be optimally shared. This might be location, time, situation - ‘just in time’ communication and interaction, as Jyri put it. I liked the crisp, functional and potentially exciting delivery and implications of this basic model of community modelling.

Next came Matt Jones of Dopplr, a bit of a hero, who quoted some Brian Eno, poured scorn on fake followers on Friendfeed and called for a Pause button to relieve the ever-louder din from within and without social networks. Dopplr is not about ‘friends’ - it’s about relationships. Friend implies a trust and staus that is assumed, based on the most tenuous premises. Friend is not the only role we play. There are so many others, and in this context, the constraints of social networks as we currently understand and exist within them, the terrible paucity of expression, the non-recognition of the gradations of respect, trust and amicability, must be seen as a missed opportunity, restrictive, and possibly damaging to our health.

Addy Feuerstein pitched his own new social network, AllofMe.com, which I like the look of, but quite possibly only because I am one of the narcissists Addy is targeting. At AllofMe.com you get to link together your whole life on a timeline, pulling in content sources to illustrate and explain where you were at (maps), who you were with (blogs, phtos), what you were listening to (Last.FM), etc. at a given time. I think it has potential, but I am the sucker they’re looking for, and Andy and Duncan both jeered, so maybe I was missing something.

Philip Rosedale admitted he was jetlagged and stoned, I think, and then provided evidence. He said something about Burning Man/Burning Life (Buring Life being the Second Life simulacrum of Burning Man the desert fire festival) and then lurched into a personal anecdote about Burning Man, which, on his first visit in 1999, just as he was founding Second Life, he saw as a place where reality is reclaimed. You can see where it went, and to be fair he did riff his own three part model/process around this:

1. Burning Man is (or was) purposeless - which I think is dubious; don’t (or didn’t) they go to the desert to build a massive wicker man and then torch it? Singular, but purposeful.

2. Burning Man is symmetrical (see note on ’stoned’ above) in that everyone behaves in exactly the same way to everyone else - again wrong.

3. Burning Man is an adverse environment, where nature is hostile and there is genuine fear of physical harm.

True in itself, but Rosedale then claimed he’d tried to instil these qualities to Second Life. My laptop runs hot sometimes but not enough to render my immediate environment an arid, burning waste land. There were some nice visionary stuff about how the plasticity of Second Life gets reflected back IRL, as we used to say, and perhaps should start saying again, and vice versa, and a story of some guy who shed 70lbs as a direct result of him spending a lot of time In 2L, some stuff on minds and computers as modelling devices, which I’ve heard much better done a long time ago… The brain is so adaptable, apparently. Thanks Phil, hadn’t clocked that one yet. Second Life exists, sure, and people are beignning to experiment, but the case is still unproven in terms of it becoming the Grid you dream of.

So three out of four, but it was a quality three. Some good questions too, but I’m going to cover them tomorrow after some more considderation.