Identity: your online presence - projecting your presence through the electronic medium - includes related articles on online feedback and the RumorMonger system

RELease 1.0, July 15, 1993

Now ECI is based in a studio-cure-care in Santa Monica, CA, with links to other ECI sites around the world. including Managua, Paris and the 21st-Century Odyssey project with Biosphere II (where else could Biospherians hang out?). A mobile unit in Europe travels to major shows. There are ISDN subnets in Japan and Europe, complete with CD-quality audio. ECI in Santa Monica will get ISDN this month. Soon it will open cares in Denmark, Kiev and Manhattan. Notably, Viacom (home of Nickelodeon and MTV) will be opening the Manhattan site (a five-performance pilot), called the Cyberspace Care, in its cafeteria overlooking Times Square. Viacom got interested in ECI through some of its corporate IS group programmers; controller (sic) Kevin Layart found it compelling enough to agree to the experiment.

ECI gets funding from anywhere it can: it charges $5 to $10 admission; it gets commissions from museums, corporations and festivals; and it gets equipment from carriers and vendors that hope to get press exposure and to learn more about the equipment's potential uses.

(4) Xerox PARC admired it 80 much, it built a version as part of its Portland Experiment.

(5) The 1984 setup: slow-scan video cameras with adjustable frame-rate/resolution from Robot Research; desktop audioconferencing from Doretoo; a conference bridge from ComTech; TeleWriters (shared electronic sketchpads) from Optel; and terminals connected by BBS software from the Community Memory Project (CMP), a public-access system implemented by Lee Felsenstein (now at Interval Research). They had the CMP software modified so sketches and stills captured could be stored to optical disk, printed or called up later. The care sites were wallpapered with the products of these efforts.

Applause and raspberries online

Tim Stryker, the president of Galacticomm, a BBS-system vendor, has fantasized about a novel form of feedback: If you see something you like, you aim your more-of-this gun at it and shoot; see something you hate, zap it with the less-of-this gun. The zapping increases or lowers that entity's likelihood of survival. Online, this kind of feedback could be done by measuring where you click on the "go-away" button, or maybe just by hitting the "<" and ">" keys as many times as you like. This would be a great middle ground between surveying or commenting and keeping quiet.

A brief aside

While at Apple, Chesley used epidemic algorithms (see below) to build a playful system called RumorMonger, which propagated quickly across Apple. RumorMonger is a no-attribution system. People only have to type the command "spread this," and RumorMonger leaps into action, spreading the rumor to other machines on the network. This quickly caused some problems. In the spirit of anonymous channels, people began sending nasty messages and impersonating other people. Also, because there was no practical marginal cost to creating rumors, many tended to be content free and wasted time and resources.

Researchers at Xerox PARC created so-called epidemic algorithms for distributing data. In the RumorMonger implementation, new rumors are marked as "hot," and are offered to other participants, whose RumorMonger software either accepts them or turns them down depending on whether it has seen them or not. When they are turned down, their "temperature" is automatically downgraded, until they vanish,