“The appearance one portrays in his or her photographs has important implications for their professional and social life,” said Sonoma psychologist Laura Naumann, who carried out the study along with Sam Gosling of The University of Texas.

In the study, participants were asked to view full-body photos of people they never met in controlled poses and in natural poses. They were then asked questions about the people based on their observations and their answers were compared to answers from people who knew the people in the photos.

While some information was accurately gleamed from the controlled poses, the study revealed just how much information is communicated in the natural poses. Participants were able to correctly identify nine out of 10 personality traits from the way people presented themselves in the pictures.

“We have long known that people jump to conclusions about others on the basis of very little information,” says Gosling, “but what’s striking about these findings is how many of the impressions have a kernel of truth to them, even on the basis of something as simple a single photograph.”

Naumann said the finding can help people create the impression they want to make. “If you want potential employers or romantic suitors to see you as a warm and friendly individual, you should post pictures where you smile or are standing in a relaxed pose,” she suggests.

But those days are coming to an end. Transmedia storytelling – using multiple media platforms to tell various parts of a large and complex story – is quickly gaining stature and credibility. The new form, pioneered by the Wachowski brothers through the Matrix series, often includes movies, video games, comic books, and animated features. Every medium tells its own part of the story while maintaining full fidelity to original “universe.”

Henry Jenkins, who popularized the term transmedia in his book Convergence Culture, notes that some stories can become too large for any individual to master.  To work properly, transmedia storytelling depends on a collective intelligence generated by the people who experience the stories (and even those who create them). That’s why the rise of the Internet, and particularly the host of Web 2.0 platforms, has been vital to the rise of the new narrative form.

Jeff Gomez, another pioneer of the form, explains the creative and economic elements of transmedia storytelling in the clip blow:

It also reveals the gap between reality and virtual reality. MIT student Benjamin Waber used the technique to study social patterns among a group of workers. Instead of asking people about their social habits, Waber outfitted each employee with an electronic monitor that tracked the location and duration of all their conversations.

Waber’s results, as documented in Wired magazine, show that social networks in the real world function differently from social networks in cyberspace; sometimes the two are diametrically opposed.

On the Web, the best way to solve a problem is to engage an extensive network; the person who provides information, advice, or answers is often someone you know only vaguely — a weak link.

In the face-to-face world, though, Waber says, groups are more productive when the team members know each other well, sharing extremely strong links. That’s because face-to-face teamwork requires intimacy, he says, and “when you’re among friends you can really capitalize on preexisting protocols” — nods, grunts, in-jokes — for talking and listening.

The research also gave Waber strong insight into how information flows through the company. Waber found that one person in each network serves as a super-connector, getting news out to the team. Not surprisingly, that person is almost never the manager. It’s usually the person working below the radar who’s getting the real stuff done.

Of course, the knock on reality mining is the obvious infringement of privacy, which will only increase as the method grows and continues showing imperssive results. But according to MIT researcher Nathan Eagle, the key is finding ways to use the information that serve the common good. 

“Right now practically the only use for it is for law enforcement to use it to investigate crimes and put people in jail,” he says. “I just think it can be put to better use to deliver services that are interesting or that help people.”

The virus model itself spread like a virus across the field of marketing. It sits at the heart of popular marketing books such as The Tipping Point and The Anatomy of Buzz, and has spawned a whole new field of marketing, called viral marketing.

But according to network-theory scientist Duncan Watts, the virus model, and especially its reliance on influentials, fails to account for important aspects of how information travels. Influentials may increase the number of people exposed to an idea, but there is little evidence to show they are vital to the start of any trend.

A better model, he suggests, is that of a forest fire. Thousands of fires begin in forests each year, but only a few grow into massive blazes. The key factors that determine whether the fires spread, he said, are environmental – whether the forest is ready to ignite. If the earth is dry and the wind is blowing in a favorable direction, any match could could create a major catastrophe. But the same match dropped on a rainy day would have no effect at all.  

Stephan Covey, in the Seven Habits of Hightly Effective People, refers to a similar concept when writing about the Circle of Influence. He asks readers to make a list of the things they care about enough about to expend some of our mental or emotional energy on them. That is the Circle of Concern. Within that list, he suggests making a division between the things they can change and the things they can’t. That is the Circle of Influence.   

“Proactive people focus their efforts on the Circle of Influence,” he writes. “They work on the things they can do something about. The nature of their energy is positive, enlarging, and magnifying, causing their Circle of Influence to increase.”   

Playing to the base works the same way. The more ideas are reinforced, the more relevence they accumulate. This concept is particularly true in politics. A centrist, Middle-of-the-road candidate may not offend people from either side, but he’s unlikely to inspire them either. Candidates who clearly articulate the views of their supporters have a greater chance of bringing them to the polls. The strategy worked for George W. Bush in the last two elections.

The Washington Post analyzed Bush’s strategy, as guided by his advisor Karl Rove.

Rove has argued that tending to your political base and reaching beyond it are not incompatible. He talks of raising “bold colors” on conservative issues such as tax cuts, the protection of unborn life and the appointment of originalist judges. At the same time, he has advocated policy innovations to appeal to new voters… From 2000 to 2004, this approach excited conservative enthusiasm; boosted President Bush’s support among Hispanics, Asian Americans, Catholics and women; and increased his popular vote total in his reelection bid by 23 percent.

By keeping the base firmly in his corner, Rove had no difficulty finding common ground with other demographic groups. Had he pursued the new voters without taking care of his base, he would have lost both and probably the election as well.

“I’ve had it,” he wrote. “I get more than 300 emails a day and my problem isn’t spam, it’s PR people. Lazy flacks send press releases to the Editor in Chief of Wired because they can’t be bothered to find out who on my staff, if anyone, might actually be interested in what they’re pitching.”

The problem, Anderson explained, isn’t that he hates PR people or press releases in general. He hates the ”lazy flacks” who make no effort to learn about his interests before sending an email.

He has a point, on at least two levels. Irrelevent e-mails annoy the people who get them. People who send them are wasting everyone’s time, not least their own.

At the end of a second post on the issue, Anderson pulls out a quote from one of the commentors who understands how to avoid turing PR into spam:  

Almost every email I send to my “spam list” (self titled), gets some sort of reply. Like “Cool event, can’t make it – sorry. Keep me posted on the next one” Or “Wow, can we get two press passes.” Or most often, “Can you email us contestants in our constituency so we can interview them for the local angle?”

Of the 1500 or so people (note, “people” not “titles”) in my self-collected db, I think I’ve gotten 10 un-subscribes. All of whom just switched jobs. There’s no one in our dB that covers the weather. Or wars. Or fluffy little kittens. They all cover tech, robots, AI, etc. And they LIKE getting my “spam.”

The problem, they say, is that people get so turned off by all the notifications, alerts, and random news items they receive through the groups that they end up blocking all the good stuff that goes with it.  

Many people have told us that they have turned off notifications from these groups because they were getting too many emails. But this is a lot like not using the telephone because too many telemarketers call you. Eighty-four percent of American Internet users have used the Internet to interact with a group — more than those that have used the Internet to read news, search for health information, or buy something. Online groups are where your peers are; they are the “social networks” for grownups.

The solution is fairly simple: consolidate your inboxes.

Teten and Allen then give a step-by-step clinic on creating filtering folders to help us get the good stuff faster. They also make a key point about online group involvement. It isn’t important to be very active in the groups, but when you do get involved, make sure to add value to the group by accessing your particular expertise or your business.

But even without the useful tips on consolidating the information, Teten and Allen are right about online groups. There really is action there we don’t think about in discussions of Web 2.0. But these groups have a lot to offer in a setting that many people naturally relate to and know how to use.

The groups I know tend to develop elements of community simply because the same people interact with one another on a regular basis and get to know each other, at least on the email level. Each group has people who are extremely active, people who seen to be completely inactive, and people we wish weren’t active at all (but almost always seem to be among the most active).  

Because these groups coalesce around people with common goals, or at least common interests, they present opporunities to spread information to the “base” – the people most likely to accept the information and possibly spread it themselves. The stronger an idea stands within its base of support, the deeper it penetrates into the collective.  

While Facebook may be growing beyond all measure and new groups continue to spring up and offer all types of new opportunities, its important to remember where we can count on finding people we most want to reach. And nothing has displaced the simple email affinity group from its status as our greatest connector.

Addressing a Copenhagen gathering of insider delegates, including a sizeable contingent from Canada,  Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said NATO is “frankly in the Stone Age” when it comes to many aspects of public diplomacy.

“When there is an incident in Afghanistan, the Taliban are quick to say there have been high numbers of civilian casualties. The wires pick it up, then the TV stations, then the Web,” Scheffer said. But by the time NATO has investigated, checked the results and passed the information through its approval system, “our response comes days later – if we are lucky. By that time, we have totally lost the media battle.”

The issues will be picked up again in a meeting next month in the Netherlands.

“The Taliban is making videos every day and NATO is not on TV,” Senior NATO spokesperson James Appathurai told the Star. “The Taliban has websites. We don’t have websites, certainly not an effective Afghan website.

Sources say NATO will put new emphasis on Web videos, including the declassification of images previously thought too sensitive to publicize, and place a premium on fleet-footed communication, possibly using rapid-reaction teams to mobilize when Taliban-conceived falsehoods hit the press.

“This is a turning point because now there is consensus that NATO needs to do much, much better at communication, first and foremost with video,” said Appathurai.

“We need to be on YouTube.”

The New York Times discussed the phenomenon in a recent feature on StumbleUpon, a social media site that allows people to share sites they find interesting.

 Say you are a soccer fan, but you are neither in the market for new cleats nor in search of the buzz on Greg Ryan, the coach of the United States women’s team. Instead, you just want to see interesting soccer sites. Googling “interesting soccer” or “great soccer stuff” is not likely to be satisfying.

A Web service called StumbleUpon has spent the last six years trying to satisfy such a need, perfecting a formula to help you discover content you are likely to find interesting. You tell the service about your professional interests or your hobbies, and it serves up sites to match them. As you “stumble” from site to site, you will feel as if you are channel-surfing the Internet, or rather, a corner of the Internet that is most relevant to you.

The article describes discovery search as “niche activity” but pointed out that StumbleUpon has grown from 600,000 registered users to 3.5 million in the past two years, suggesting that the concept is beginning to take off.

And with about 30 million members and growing, it is perfectly positioned for political activism. According to Wired magazine, activists looking to organize dozens of simultaneous rallies for the people of Myanmar turned to Facebook to spread the news.

Amateur activists and big-league political nonprofit groups find Facebook an easy way to connect citizens around the globe and help them push their collective concerns to the top of politicians’ agendas, a development that marks the beginnings of what might be called “open-source politics.”

“We’re working very closely with the people from Facebook,” says Mark Farmaner, Burma Campaign UK’s acting director. “They’re able to do things that we can’t because we’re a small organization with a small capacity — they’ve been able to mobilize people, and there’s been a division of labor.”

Open source politics, or politics 2.0, helped energize Howard Dean’s presidential campaign and spawned the “netroots” in the blogosphere and on social networking sites. Despite these successes, however, the concept has remained on the fringes of the political word, embraced primarily as an “alternative” approach to activisism partially because of a generation gap in relating to technology and partially because it has appealed mainly to progressive activists. 

But with Facebook’s rocket trajectory sweeping through virtually every segment of the population, the very concept of “mainstream” is evolving before our very eyes.  And organizing political rallies is just the beginning of Facebook activism. The New York Times reported recently on a Facebook-based direct action that saved a popular candy bar from being discontinued.

Users of Facebook, the social networking service, make up for any shortcomings in spelling, grammar and punctuation with their sheer numbers. After nearly 14,000 people joined “bring back Wispa” groups on Facebook, the food conglomerate Cadbury Schweppes announced on Aug. 17 that it would reintroduce the candy bar in October.

Keeping a candy bar in production may not sound like much but it illustrates that nearly anything can be achieved by organizing on Facebook, from the trivial to the crucially important. Indeed, a few weeks later the Times had another story of Facebook activism, this time involving an effort to ban a group accused of hate speech against Muslims. Within days, some 75,000 people joined the effort to block the group.

And that’s what I call open source politics.