Written by Dan Zak

Narcissism? Pseudo-celebrity? Boredom? Whatever the motivator, Facebook’s “25 Things” lists are surely clogging up your news feed. (Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

1. We have been tagged in a Facebook note titled “25 Random Things About Me.”

2. Update: We have received seven of these alerts in the past seven days from seven different people.

3. This is just another online outbreak of mass self-disclosure and self-importance, like personality e-mail forwards of yore (boxers or briefs? Pacino or De Niro?). Everyone is typing out Random Things this week, and asking — nay, tagging — us to do the same.

4. A friend’s No. 3 Random Thing: “One of my favorite things to do is belt out monster ballads in my car, while pretending that I don’t see people looking at me like I’ve lost my mind.”

5. We are above reading these carefully worded train-of-thought brain dumps, we think. And we’ll make our own list only if we get paid by the item.

6. We read them anyway. Each list amounts to a single-spaced, one-page document enumerating “facts, habits, or goals” about the author.

7. Fact: We are weak.

8. Habit: Checking Facebook every 30 minutes.

9. Goal: To get back to work.

10. So we turn this Facebook mini-phenomenon into work.

11. In the past week, the daily rates of note-creating and friend-tagging have doubled and quintupled, respectively, says Brandee Barker, Facebook’s director of communications. “People of all ages and from all over the world are writing 25 very touching and insightful ‘things’ about their lives and tagging friends in order to share it more broadly,” she says.

12. A friend’s No. 17: “I have pooped my pants more than three times as an adult.”

13. Sociology 101: People use Facebook like this to compete for attention. “Attention is power,” says Michael Stefanone, assistant professor of communication at the University at Buffalo. “You see this in waves, friends contacting friends with this request. It’s self-serving.”

14. Sociology 201: People are supremely comfortable sharing intimate information about themselves in this pseudo-celebrity culture of online social networking, Stefanone says, but “what happens when I can learn about you and you’re not aware of it? These information asymmetries might put people at a disadvantage.” It’s reality TV’s fault, according to his latest study. We believe it. All those on-camera confessions and weirdly personal interviews . . . all of a sudden America knows a little too much about your banal private matters.

15. A former teacher’s No. 11: “I knew I was going to marry my wife when I went over to finally break up with her — and then couldn’t. This, despite the fact that she was looking particularly unattractive that day, and yet I have never seen something lovelier.”

16. We are touched.

17. We feel stupid, getting emotional about something that amounts to a marketing boon for Facebook.

18. We feel misled when we see that many of these Random Things are just comic fabrications, or textual performance pieces.

19. A friend’s No. 5: “I killed John Updike.”

20. Fact: Lung cancer killed John Updike.

21. Maybe this contagion isn’t about self-disclosure; it’s about our obsession with lists. It’s a comfortable format. It’s an orderly way to publicize the Random Things that make us oh-so-special.

22. Once you make a list about yourself, “you’ll suddenly discover an inventory of personal secrets, fears, and desires that flow out effortlessly and surprise you. There you are, big as life, in list form,” according to the book “List Your Self: Listmaking as the Way to Self-Discovery.”

23. Wait a minute. We are more complicated than list form, than pseudo-celebrity! Our journey of self-discovery is not divisible by numbered items!

24. Goal: Not to reduce ourselves to Random Things.

25. Fact: Too late.

There’s been a lot of chatter about the newspaper industry in recent weeks — about whether newspaper companies should find something like iTunes, or use micropayments as a way to charge people for the news, or sue Google, or all of the above — and how journalism is at risk because newspapers are dying. But there’s been very little discussion about something that has the potential to fundamentally change the way that newspapers function (or at least one newspaper in particular), and that is the release of the New York Times’ open API for news stories. The Times has talked about this project since last year sometime, and it has finally happened; as developer Derek Gottfrid describes on the Open blog, programmers and developers can now easily access 2.8 million news articles going back to 1981 (although they are only free back to 1987) and sort them based on 28 different tags, keywords and fields.

It’s possible that this kind of thing escapes the notice of traditional journalists because it involves programming, and terms like API (which stands for “application programming interface”), and is therefore not really journalism-related or even media-related, and can be understood only by nerds and geeks. But if there’s one thing that people like Adrian Holovaty (lead developer of Django and founder of Everyblock) have shown us, it is that broadly speaking, content — including the news — is just data, and if it is properly parsed and indexed it can become something quite incredible: a kind of proto-journalism, that can be formed and shaped in dozens or even hundreds of different ways.

Doing this with all of the various elements of the news — names, places, events, details — on a large enough basis can reveal hidden patterns or connections that might not only improve an existing story but lead to new and completely unexpected ones. At the moment, only the research departments of newspapers have the tools to do this, but opening up an API the way the New York Times has can put those tools into anyone’s hands, allowing them to pursue projects and avenues that newspaper reporters and researchers might never think of. And from the point of view of the Times as a media outlet and business, it turns the paper into a kind of platform for other services and features. That makes the paper and its content more valuable, and could lead to all kinds of commercial licensing possibilities and partnerships — not to mention being good marketing.

This kind of thinking is at the core of Jeff Jarvis’s book “What Would Google Do?” His main point is that virtually any business can benefit from thinking about making its data more open, allowing others to remix and manipulate it to see what comes out, and then taking advantage of what can be learned from those experiments. All the New York Times is doing is using its article database in the same way that Google uses its map database, or the Google Earth satellite-imagery database — as a foundation upon which other things can be built. The Times deserves kudos for pursuing such a open model rather than locking its articles up and trying to charge people for every view. I have no doubt that they will benefit far more from such an approach in the long run than would ever be possible with a pay-per-view strategy.

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When the financial crisis reached full bloom last fall, it took many technology companies some time before they were able to appreciate the impact it would have on them. This year, we’re seeing the fallout in the form big losses or shrunken profits, layoffs and other signs of retrenchment.

Alongside the pain, however, there’s a sense of optimism — that the worst is over and the tech industry just has to muddle through until the economy recovers. But the worst may not, in fact, be over; Financial Meltdown 2.0 might be lurking around the corner to deliver a second, possibly harsher blow.

The tech world is at a crossroads. But the choice of which road we take isn’t ours. It belongs to the financial markets and the regulators who are still struggling to right them. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is expected to unveil another plan to address the big banks’ bad assets and stop more homeowners from falling into foreclosure. Details of the plan may offer a signpost as to where we’re headed.

Down one road is a scenario described by Cisco CEO John Chambers this week:

“The majority of our customers are guessing 2010 while a smaller group sees the upturn towards the end of 2009. Given the coordinated activities of global central banks and the extremely large stimulus packages that are being implemented in almost all of our major countries, I tend to be a little bit more optimistic than most of my customers.”

The other road isn’t so sunny, and it’s the road we’ll head down if Geithner’s fix doesn’t work and the markets slip into another crisis. Some of the people who saw the banking crisis coming early on are suggesting that course is the more likely one. George Soros argued last week that bank assets are still deteriorating despite the first round of rescue money, a fact evident in bank stock prices. Others, like Eric Sprott, Bill Gross and Mark Faber, are now discussing a depression as if it’s a near certainty.

Not a recession, a depression.

If executives at technology companies are also talking about this, it’s not very audible. Last week’s news focused on new ways of looking at the ocean floor from your computer, or being able track (even stalk) your friends. These are interesting enough innovations, but what are companies planning to do if another crisis hits?

Right now, an economic depression is still far from certain, but the possibility is real enough that companies will need to prepare. What will it mean?

At first, it will favor large, cash-rich companies like Google, Microsoft and Cisco, or any company that can finance itself through its own operations. Others with decent promise but weak cash flows might hope to be bought. VCs will be forced to trim portfolios. Companies that have cut staff to the bone will have to cut more, even at the risk of hurting future growth. But even healthier companies might see their cash flows dwindle over time.

For the past few years, most tech companies have progressed incrementally, tossing out a new feature or a new gadget and seeing what takes root. But an even tougher economy would demand harder questions, rethinking what a company does at the most basic level: Why is your company here? What is it offering and why would someone else want to pay for your stuff?

In short, what would your company look like in a dramatically different economic landscape? To be clear, let me say again that the landscape may not necessarily change. Maybe John Chambers’ optimism will prove to be right. But we have reached a point where we need to at least be asking, what if things are worse that we think?

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Today is Waitangi Day in New Zealand, our National Day of Scratching Our Heads and Wondering Whether We Should Scrap This Day and Get Ourselves A Real National Day Instead. Despite the obvious debauchery taking place on such an occasion, I've taken the time to bring you four tasty science, art, mobile, and data links. Have a good weekend!

1. Add Art -- a clever Firefox adblocker hack to replace ads with art work. The selection of art is curated and updated regularly. (via Tim on Twitter)
2. Yahoo's Key Scientific Challenges -- Yahoo! offers money and access to PhD students whose projects fall into these categories. For example: "Meaningful Instrumentation: Activity and interaction data are logged by most application and devices as a matter of course. Most logging protocols foreground system operations for debugging and optimization. However, what forms of device instrumentation and from these what kinds of metrics best reflect user experience of the internet across different devices and applications? What does a human centered, internet logging and data analysis paradigm look like? What new forms of "experience logging" are emerging?"
3. Golden Age of Cellphones (Tim Bray) -- this post is almost a month but I've kept the tab open to see whether I still believe it. I do. We're seeing the door open to mass adoption of cellphones that fail to suck (even though the mobile phone market dropped 12% in Q4 2008, smartphones grew) and the more open the device in your hand, the better chance there is that something good for the user can be made.
4. Personal Data Integration (Toby Segaran) -- another oldie but goodie, this one from 2008. Toby pulled contacts from phone calls, email, contacts, social networks, etc. and built a visual representation of who he talks to and how often. His friend groups show up as clusters, which leads me to wonder how much of the pain of building groups in social networking apps could be replaced with simple observation and analysis ("you talk to these people who talk to each other, what would you like to call this group?").

Our sister site MobileCrunch may be convinced that not every company needs an app store, but for Nokia to launch a central platform for distribution and sales of micro-programs developed for the Symbian OS, it would make a whole lotta sense.

And if what Eldar Murtazin, editor of Mobile-review.com (both blogs are in Russian) writes is true, then that’s exactly what the Finnish juggernaut in mobile is going to launch at the upcoming Mobile World Congress. I concur with Engadget who says launching an application portal/store is a logical step to take for any mobile handset maker these days, but if Nokia is in fact going to launch one it will be worth taking a look at, and not only from a consumer or developer standpoint.

According to UnwiredView, this is what Murtazin wrote in Russian:

At first glance, for now, the app portal looks so so, there is some confusion. But they are trying, polishing it and a lot has changed for the better in a matter of days. A right step in a right direction… And the distribution and revenue sharing model between app makers and Nokia looks very attractive.

At this point, this is nothing but a rumor, but such a move would definitely make sense and Muzartin is known to have strong insider connections in the mobile industry so this isn’t just a random thought from a blogger.

It’s worth noting in this context that Nokia now fully owns Symbian Limited, but contributes the mobile operating system and S60 software to the Symbian Foundation, which is readying its official launch with a slew of members from the industry, including Sony Ericsson, Samsung, LG, Sharp and dozens more. There’s also an active community site for Symbian developers already in place, so they wouldn’t be creating an ecosystem from scratch.

Then again, as someone pointed out in the comments of the Engadget post, Nokia already has a couple of half-baked portals for mobile software, e.g. Mosh, Download! and Software Market, so it’s unclear what would happen to those or how they would be able to morph these sites as well as the N-Gage platform for games into one single application store.

We’ll find out more about Nokia’s plans at the Mobile Word Congress, which is being held from 16 to 19 February in Barcelona.

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Lisa Katayama says:

In November, I went to Tokyo with the producers of Studio360 to work on an hour-long radio show about Japanese art and culture. It aired February 7 on NPR, and has tons of great content based on our reporting there — a visit to suicide forest, a peek into the world of depressed youth, wisdom from travel writer Pico Iyer, as well as interviews with local poets, designers, and architects. I produced my own segment about three provocative, successful young female artists whom I thought would be vocal feminists. But interestingly, when I asked them to explain the deeper meaning behind their work, they said there was none. Later, in New York, I met an artist who told me that she, too, grew up painting provocative women in Japan, but she only realized she was a feminist when she went to art school in the US and was encouraged to think about the hidden meaning behind her work. The audio segments and some awesome video clips that the highly talented Studio360 producers made are all up on their web site.

Studio360 in Japan via TokyoMango

ShopIt, a social commerce platform that enables people to set up an online store and sell goods through a variety of social networking services, has finished integrating its recently acquired Triana Global publisher network and relaunching it as ShopIt Media, another social advertising platform.

Like many others, Triana Global claims to have been one of the first ad networks that started focussing on monetizing facebook applications after the social networking service started opening up for outside developers with the launch of Facebook Platform back in May 2007. Its biggest competitors are Adknowledge (which recently picked up both Cubics and Lookery Ads), Social Media, Offerpal Media and Appssavvy.

The service has managed to stay largely under the radar since its launch, and even when they started guaranteeing floor CPM rates of $0.15 and $0.08 CPC rates on standard banner sizes for new developers joining the network they seem to have gotten the silence treatment and were also downright criticized for developing their own Facebook apps besides acting as a social advertising network. It didn’t help that Triana Global claimed to have hundreds of applications in their network, which they later expanded to other social networks like MySpace, hi5 and Bebo, but never published a portfolio or customer reference list.

Either way, apparently the company was acquired by ShopIt in October 2008, and that startup is now relaunching the service as ShopIt Media, essentially providing a way for their users (1 million according to the company) to market the products they have for sale across a multitude of social communities. New publishers are being wooed with a 80% revenue share for all campaigns on Facebook, Ning, MySpace, hi5, Bebo and Orkut that are kicked off in February.

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As I read The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and a draft of Joshua Ramo's new book, I notice a common theme in many of the good books that I'm reading. Most significant events are not predictable. "Education" and at the notion that we actually understand the world causes us to be unprepared for the unpredictable. Science, which makes a great attempt at trying to make the world appear predictable, is really a rough approximation of things so that our simple minds can try to grasp the complex world around us. It also remind me of Science in Action by Bruno Latour which I wrote about years ago which argues that scientific facts are really a product of a very social and political process and isn't really a kind of channeling of mother nature as it might appear to be.

In The Way of Zen, Alan Watts has a wonderful explanation of how western science and philosophy and words themselves take the unknowable "void" and turn them into "rigorous" and "understandable" abstractions of the world which can't really be described by science or words. In a way, everything we write or argue is a version of the "assume a frictionless surface" or as Joshua says in his book, "imagine a spherical cow" jokes about physicists failing at describing solutions to real-world problems. All of our theories are very incomplete models of the real world and the only way to really get close to understanding the real world requires a kind of "unlearning" and a connection with the real world at an intuitive and an "uneducated" level.

Immersion and mindfulness are really important ways to see things that you normally don't see. I think it was Thich Nhat Hanh who said that a monastery is not a good place to learn to meditate because anyone can meditate in a monastery. (This might have been the Dalai Lama... I can't find the reference right now.) It is through learning mindfulness and meditation when there is chaos, suffering and pressure, that we really learn.

In a way, part of the reason for my moving to the Middle East was that while I continue to learn in any environment, days that I spend in the US or Japan tend to be mostly similar to previous days and relatively predictable, pushing me towards the somewhat typical mode of feeling in control or knowledgeable about what's going on.

What I find fascinating (and stressful) is that every day I spend in the Middle East is completely full of surprises and pushes me closer and closer to the understanding that I really don't understand anything. Sort of the pure idiot mode. In a way, I've become more aware and much more mindful of everything. One effect of this is that I less and less fear of the unpredictable and the unknown and unknowable.

I'm still really at the beginning of my immersion process, but chatting with everyone about my experiences in Dubai and reading some of the books that I brought with me helped me tie together some of these thoughts and reflect so I though I'd share. ;-)

[Cartoon inspired by this old blog post....]