That’s not nice, mama’s been taking good care of you.

Because you’re here, I can’t work as much into the nights.

But because you’re here, I’m more inspired to.

Democracy sucks. Because the majority is always wrong. If America were a true democracy, Justin Bieber would be president.

After all, more people tune into him than they do for the current president, or the news.

So when designing the Inn’s interactions, it’s important to have ways to make sure everyone does NOT have equal power or privilege.

There has to be a competition. A natural selection for the fittest to win. Any other non-organic or artificial method will produce artificial biases, like bailouts propping up a phony economy that ought to fail.

The Inn’s newly installed natural selection mechanism is the 30-day Leaderboard. Each Room will have a Leaderboard. Members climb the leaderboard by the number of positive responses they receive for their Stories. Not views. Responses. 

And members at the top of the leaderboard earn privileges to make changes in a Room.

It’s kind of a nifty, happy by-product I didn’t forsee when designing the leaderboard. If  there are no leaders, the Room is a democracy where anyone can rule. When leaders emerge, the leaders have authority for as long as they can remain in power. And the power comes from “votes” cast by fellow members.

Amanda Palmer said, “We can only connect the dots that we collect.” And that’s why we should never strive to be perfect, because we can never have all the dots to start. Instead, we just have to get moving.

“Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up,too.” – Isabel Allende

Dream direct mail scenario: evergreen list and evergreen offer. I.e., offer can be mailed repeatedly with necessary ROI, and list replenishes quickly enough so you never run out of names. 

Otherwise, you want lists large enough to yield enough names after deep multiple selects, and also to roll out successful campaigns. Either way, it seems you need a BIG universe of LISTs, but it’s not efficient to build your own.

So what do we do? Parasite other people’s lists. But they won’t just let you in. So, what else can we do? Be attractive to list owners — Influencers. Attract influencers in order to get at their lists.

How? The Inn itself has to become a reputation behemoth. One way is the Huffington Post model: Attract influencers to write – influencers pull in their people. Influencers’ content & references back -> reputation up -> have more rep to bestow on future guests. Do not follow Twitter/Facebook’s model of non-persistent pages. At the Inn, every post ought to live forever.

Need to be attractive to Influencers. Attractive enough for them to want to play here, and bring followers over to play here.

But which Influencers to attract?

Although attracting influencers can be a scalable way to build the Inn’s list (1 influencer brings N followers), it’s still not the most efficient. We ought not to look for raw numbers. We’d rather not play the large numbers game. Instead, we ought to filter and attract multi-buyers. Because, you only need a small number of affluent multi-buyers to be as productive as a large number of one-time buyers.

E.g., makers and doers are multi-buyers, because usually never stop making or doing. Also, winners who have a habit of winning.

Hollywood is flooded with a record number of sequels. It’s “safer” to bank on a previously successful franchise than to create a new one.

Sadly, the world of technology is going the same way. Money prefers to go to sure investments. For instance, an app that automates an everyday personal or business task.

Will present and future creators have the freedom, courage, insight and motivation to create new experiences anymore?

Or is the best stuff we can come up with in the digital world? If it is, it seems like a waste of all this technology.

Like the chain story, the “Exquisite corpse” is similar to an old parlour game called Consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution.

This is the inspiration behind the story format at The Inn. Each story is designed to grow as members join in the conversation. There can be many story chains going at once in each room.

Will one of them be the world’s longest story?

Whole bottle of wine. All gone. Feels good. Old wine. Had to drink it.

The visualization of Fractals doesn’t work so well in practice. Too unpredictable. Ended up looking like a spiderweb and not neat enough. So I took it off the sidebar.

Oh, and typography. Switched to Sans-serif headers and serif body. Why? Because it’s opposite of what the most popular platforms are using. It’s opposites day.

Also, damn I can’t see straight. But people have better manners when you prime them with pictures of a fancy restaurant. Sans-serif implies casual. Serif implies watch your manners. Can font be used to prime behavior and create value? We’ll see.

Good night.

… thanks to Christian SwineHart (http://arborjs.org/)

Having worked in VLSI Placement and graph optimization, hypergraphs and visualization were a well-worn jacket for me.

Although, I slipped into it more easily than I wanted to admit. (My memories were not all pleasant.)

Almost every day, I fail.

I sulk and wallow.

Then I scrape myself off the floor.

I know each time I get up, I defeat the other guy who stayed down.

In distributed computing, making something faster doesn’t always mean “do less work.”

It usually means “doing more work… in parallel”.

To do more things in parallel, it means dividing work into smaller pieces that don’t depend on each other.

For instance, each room at the Inn is made up of many pieces that fit together like a puzzle. The posts… the pictures… the recommendations… the featured gallery in the sidebar… the private messages.

Every room is dynamic – no two are alike. And each room is conjured into existence a split second before each guest steps into it.

If each piece was retrieved one at a time, you would cry waiting. But fetch all pieces simultaneously, and you travel faster than light.