Ramanujan Redux

Really, this again?

WuChess, a partnership between Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA and ChessPark, a social network around online chess playing, launches today. It’s the “world’s first online chess and hip hop community” and will also include exclusive videos and mp3 of the “hottest cats in hip hop.”

See a tour of the service here. That’s as far as most of you’ll get on WuChess, because, incredibly, they’re charging $48/year to join. ChessPark, by contrast, at least has a free version (but no videos or mp3s, sadly). The company promises to donate “a portion of the profits” to the Hip Hop Chess Federation.

Awesome. Hip hop, chess and $48 per year - definite winner.

I wouldn’t pay $50 to talk to most celebrities, much less match wits with RZA. Only Charles Barkley makes the cut right now.

The Internet is free for a reason–it’s to make us more open to each other, not to allow the richer and the privileged among us insider access. It’s to bring us on the same level, not place celebrities on a pedestal. Yardbarker allows athletes the opportunity to connect with their fans. Why can’t celebrities acknowledge that they’re human too?

It’s a trivial thing, but it’s one of the many problems the Internet solves–finding information that wasn’t easily accessible in old media days, then having the means (iTunes) to build it up.

YouTube ad commericals are something I frequent when I like the music. Of course, finding the music attached to the piece is a chore, especially if it’s instrumental. But ask the commenters and they can help you find message boards that answer your questions.

I find this particularly effective. Thanks to commenters I found out that Massive Attack was in charge of the song for this chilling West Wing clip. That Dockers SF commercial is only catchy because it evokes funk from Marlena Shaw’s California Soul. Michael Jordan knows how important advertising is, so he mixes powerful music like Zero 7’s Red Dust into his commercials.

Internet communities have the power to relay information much faster to each other than ever before, to help move us and empower us in our regular lives. The next logical step in that progression? Relaying ideas to one another. That’s what blogs, discussion boards and social networks are slowly evolving into.

And what comes after that?

What’s the next step for the Internet? We’ve reached stagnancy. Information is organized pretty well, we can track people with RSS.

Managing that chaos might be the next step. What if there was an application that tracked all your conversations (blog comments, message board responses, Facebook wall replies, )? CoComment tried it but the format was too cumbersome. Email can track some, but not all of these things. Could there be a Google Conversations in the future that manages our outreach and our communities so we don’t lose track of the open conversations we have on the Internet?

The benefits of such a program are tangible: It avoids the cumbersome nature of clicking back page after page after page. It centralizes the flow of conversation while decentralizing the conversations itself.

Friendfeed is the primitive form of such conversations, but it only deals with some programs and not all. Twitter deals with this on a micro level, but it’s me-centric. Me me me me me. What needs to be emphasized is US so that people don’t feel like they’re floating on an iceberg.

A message board is the perfect example of loose collaboration. People have ideas, other people respond to them. However, there are so many things we’re interested in that it becomes difficult to find every board every day. Message boards are still very insular in that sense–a conversation application that emphasizes each other rather than ourselves.

A big problem with the Internet today is communication. People are still ensconced within their own bubbles that it’s hard to cut through the noise and keep in touch with people.

Just a thought.

Seth Godin seems to be right on more often than not, and I think he’s starting to take on an edge. More and more the Internet is being cluttered with many, many things. However, I don’t think that’s the fault of the Internet. I think that’s just us tech geeks taking the Internet to the extreme.

My RSS feeds are huge, and I certainly only read about ten or twenty. But let’s face it–how many of you actually read your RSS? How many of you actually have RSS?

As much as I enjoy finding new information, new pictures, new sources of data, unless they add something to my life, their appeal is brief and illusory. The only time RSS is probably useful is if it’s current events (politics, sports, entertainment), or if the site is really really good (Umair Haque and Godin are two examples). I think connecting with people will require something separate (RSS 2.0?).

I don’t have it in my head quite yet, but information is one part of the Internet experience, and that’s the only thing RSS does a good job taking care of. It needs to be minimized to what you care about (basketball and football for me, celebrities and their crappy lives or politicans and election results for others) so you can make room for what really matters.

Time to prune that RSS feed now.

I’ve just been thinking about better ways to brand a site and to get people clicking on linkrolls. Some linkrolls are longer than the number of books an average person reads in their lifetime.

Wouldn’t a logo search service be useful? People respond better to imagery on a page than the name of a site. I don’t know how many people would click on RamanujanRedux if they saw it on someone’s blogroll–they’d likely ignore it.

Internal media networks like Gawker and Rudius have recognizable imagery that define the sites on their system visually (GaijinSmash for the win!). Internally, the sites do well. But for external blogrolls, do people really click on the site after the first time?

Some reasons why logos might work:

1) It shows that you care enough about the site to put the logo trademark on the back.
2) It provides a visual stimulus after glossing your eyes over with gallons of text.
3) A lot of people judge sites on their first reaction. If the logo was displayed alongside the Google search result, it could raise a decent amount of interest.
4) It provides an anchor image to associate with your site, so that your name doesn’t easily get forgotten.

For example, for my Cal football site, would seeing this image on another site’s blogroll you were visiting increase your interest at crossing over to check it out? Because I’m guessing you wouldn’t if it was just the title. Images matter.

Anyway, what I’ve been saying is that it seems clickthrough rates for links outside your network are pretty atrocious. Some sprucing might need to be done to keep raising the bar on ratcheting up the importance of searching for brands and attracting attention at first glance. Make the Internet prettier.

I like del.icio.us for my own purposes–I have easy access to bookmarks, and searching for particular tags helps me find the articles I want. I haven’t yet used it to its maximal ability though (research and reporting).

However, I feel that one of the big issues that keeps del.icio.us from being a huge part of my life is that it’s not easy to find friends and discuss what you find. You can’t set up a profile, you can’t get much further beyond sending links to each other and obtaining each other’s screennames.

In other words, the human connection is missing. And what’s necessary on the Internet is human connection. It’s why in terms of social networking, Facebook and MySpace still remain near the top despite those stupid pirate invites and lousy interfaces–there is more of a human connection there than with del.icio.us. You’re still following a collection of experts unless you decide to trailblaze on your own. Hence your parameters are still limited.

The framework for del.icio.us is still skeletal. Unfortunately, because Yahoo now owns it, I think any hope for future innovation is slim. StumbleUpon is better at helping us meet new people locally, and probably more friendly for the common Internet surfer, plus easier features to connect your friends. At best, del.icio.us is a decent business and research tool, although I can’t shake off the fact that social bookmarking still has a long way to  go.