I ran across this interesting visual+writeup recently and it struck me as close, but not exactly aligning with my experiences.

I'm not a numerologist, but I love to play with numbers and stats when given the chance, and "back in the day" when interacting with a large variety of groups of individuals while working on jabber I had many of those opportunities.

My experience was repeatedly showing the power of seven, and it sticks out in my head since it was a bit suspicious. Say your going to send out an announcement to a mailing list with 1000 people on it and it had a URL in it, around 150 would view it. Say that page had a download on it, or a form, or something that required more interaction, you might get 20 to take that step. Ultimately you'd get only a couple people that might reply or email you personally following up.

This wasn't just in mailing list postings, I experienced it with updates to the home page, source code checkins, and even the size of the community had clear layers that reflected the power of 7: if we had 5 core contributers, there were 30-40 people that would respond or play with stuff (active followers), a few hundred that would read updates or subscribe to news (passive followers), and the last layer of maybe 2000 was passerbys and users. Those relationships stayed fairly consistent as each layer grew.

Perhaps this could be generalized into some kind of mental commitment buckets that people naturally create: personal, interested, curious, fleeting. Each one having a different social or internal set of responses, with varying levels of assumed responsibility. If so, why would the relationships between them be so consistent? I can only venture to guess that it has to do with manageability and communication.

I'm pretty confident in saying that in general seven or fewer people can work well as an unstructured group, but to increase the participants you introduce structure and layers. It would follow naturally to see that a group of 50 would be the largest you could have with only two layers, seven groups and seven leaders, and to take the next step would require yet another layer, and so on... I'm quite sure someone has numbers on this for management charts in big companies (or any larger organization) and it'd be fun to see how close to the power 7 they are.

Summing this all up in a way that sounds funny: based on the readily available communication tools and apparent size of each layer, new parties may subconsciously select a level of participation in any organization.

Update: thanks to stpeter, good pointer with some mentions of 7

Since I use and love Reeferss and notice a lot of odd referrers from search engines to my site, this post is entirely an experiment to see how many random web search hits I catch. I suppose this could be considered search spam (if I had advertising?), and I apologize, my intent is purely academic here, well, more just a curiosity :)

Below is a list of the most popular 9-letter words from A9's Blog:

equipment refinance furniture insurance marketing wholesale christian treatment corporate directory education solutions christmas guestbook personals companies francisco microsoft limousine australia satellite downloads financial caribbean wisconsin vacations apartment wallpaper arthritis gardening breakfast community nutrition tennessee homesites chocolate promotion franchise packaging paintball biography telephone cartridge childrens halloween financing adventure panasonic broadband executive stainless computers elizabeth resources investing minnesota transport hollywood alexander beautiful generator celebrity herbalife batteries ecommerce landscape amplifier accessory mortgages affiliate frequency formation charlotte wrestling emergency honeymoon infection filtering hurricane universal lakefront milwaukee projector inventory galleries singapore pregnancy baltimore christina appraiser barcelona fantastic converter manhattan spiderman templates interview catherine treadmill

I don't have many (any?) readers, so most of my posts here are really for me, just a nice place to record thoughts every so often, and I should probably try to do it even more often than every few weeks.

First topic, 3bubbles. It feels like it's been 10 years now for me working on something like this, and oh wait, it has! This week 3b launched, and 10 years ago (yes, back in 1996) I first wrote a perl script web server that did real-time web chat. Back then it was hackish forms and brute force page-refreshing, now in 2006 it's very fast lightweight AJAX, although I would have expected better if you asked me back then how it would look today :)

3b began last year when I met Drew Golkar, and has endured some deep technological and philosophical development since then. With Drew's passion for wanting to empower people through dialog, he'll take this concept far. We both feel strongly about increasing the connectedness of this world and enabling people to connect with technology, 3b is just another step on that journey.

I have a theory about the coincidental universe, but I'll save that for another day. Coincidentally this week Campfire and Gmail Chat both launched as well. They are both very different species of web chat, but we're all living in the same forest. I think each compliments the other quite nicely, and that 3b has a lot of growing up to do to thrive in it's niche.

In other worlds, Sean found a few free minutes (somehow) to create Don't Ya Know this week, a highly addictive and quite silly little service.

Lastly, Dan Balocca snapped a great picture of Radio Shack, I mean, Radio hack, which I overlayed with an appropriate graphic :)

This weeks favourite blog post: The Evolution of Information Grazing

Unrelated: I wonder how many search referrers I'll get due to the title, now that I'm using reeferss I'll know right away.

It seems like an apt analogy, I have to build up some internal pressure due to outside heat in order to post a new entry here, every so often. But that's not where it came from, it's really a statement that my intentions for blogging are more for self enjoyment than for others, and somehow that says "popcorn" to me.

I wish I could talk more about some of the things I've been working on, but that will happen in due time. It's definitely keeping me busy, possibly more challenged than I've ever been, and I do enjoy being challenged (intended)!

While my head is in the silicon sand (silicorn here in Iowa I suppose) I'm catching waves going on, one of them Dave is stirring up just this weekend. Something feels fundamental here, between open source, participatory and social mediums, and invention... and I can't put my finger on it yet, but I know it's powerful and foundational.

Our group of local "geek inventors" hiding out here between the corn cattle and soybeans have for years now tossed around the idea of collaborating to form a tech incubator, much along the same principles that Dave outlines. Intentions strong, actions weak. That says something though, I'm sure we're not alone, and if digg should teach us anything, just find a way for all the weak actions to be connected and you have yourself a force of peers.

Inspired.

I always enjoy a good crazy-hard engineering brainstorm blivet. Here's a few random ones I can remember from the last week or so:

Laptop ones (inspired by the whole MacBook Pro thing today): A removable keyboard, bluetooth and lithium ion battery built in that recharges when docked inside the laptop. A LCD display on the top/front of the lid, so you have two, you can close the lid and have a tablet or when running display wallpaper or whatever, play games like battleship, use the built-in camera to make it "transparent" (that would be wicked cool). Why don't we have GPS built into laptops yet?

How about a small video-ipod-screen sized lcd usb attachment that becomes a video output source, so you can watch video without taking up space on your screen, display statistics in it, alerts, and so on...

Another USB attachment that is a dense grid of electromagnets and a smooth surface with small magnetic shapes, so that you can use software to physically move the objects on the surface around. Useful? Probably not. Cool? Heck yeah.

You know these things? Either with robotics or (again) electromagnetics control and detect the state of each pin, then set up a web service to connect two devices. Yes, send actual 3d touch and shape sensation over the Internet. No, I wasn't thinking of the pr0n uses when it crossed my mind (but other's immediately pointed it out, thanks guys).

Is anyone shipping a MEMS chip that can control the reflection of a laser in a very small form factor yet, and affordably? Perfect USB toy, just plug it in and draw stuff on the wall near you, so many fascinating uses!

I know the whole e-paper keyboard thing is already out there (and I can't wait, seriously, if you can hit the control key and the keys change to show you what they become (with full word or pictures even!). Can we start maybe with just the function keys? What about a row above them that are simply touch sensitive and perfectly flat, for brightness control, volume, etc? Ooh, even better, how about down the side of the screen and just slide your finger for brightness control there, or even scrolling?

How about e-paper for identification and last-known-state on computer systems, hard drives, components, and so on? I could go on and on for e-paper stuff.

Ok, enough for tonight, hope someone enjoys, or maybe I will when something like this shows up *someday*.