Our regular readers may have noticed a hiatus in posts, this was due to the annual holiday - which was spent sailing a yacht along the Turkish coast. What was interesting compared to the last time I sailed a real sea-going yacht (about 8 years ago) was the amount of extra electronics that it now comes with - GPS / SatNav / Autosteer / Radar / Wind direction etc.

To be sure, these thing existed 8 years ago but (i) quite a few were analog, (ii) the digital stuff was very expensive whereas now they are standard for even a relatively small boat, (iii) the electronics were quite rudimentary then - instruments, whereas they are now clearly computers, and (iv) everything is far more integrated.

What was also interesting was the speed with which the kids picked up on the electronics on the dashboard - it was almost like a computer game to them, using all the input to then navigate and sail the yacht (see picture below)



The impact of this has been to massively reduce the skill level required to sail a yacht - a good thing in that it allows people to access sailing after far fewer hours logged, but also a potentially bad thing for two reasons:

(i) There is a tendency to be overconfident in conditions where instruments, for all their effectiveness, cannot yet sail the ship - for example freshening winds (ie when to release / reef sail), and dealing with non measured things eg side on swell, other boats etc

(ii) The lessening of hours put in meant - in my observation anyway - some of the sailors understood less of the "rules of the road" conventions. This has long been a problem with power boats, where the only qualifications needed in many countries are the ability to write a cheque and to turn an ignition key, but it is more problematic with sailing yachts as they are more complex devices.

(Incidentally, I wonder if the yacht/powerboat thing is an allegory for green technology overall - it is just harder to use it well?)

However, looking at all the data coming in from my own yacht, plus all the potential network data that was also available, it clearly will not be long before even small cruising yachts will be running with pretty sophisticated sailing algorithms (I'm sure big ones do already).

The other thing that interested me was internet access - I was connectable at nearly all times to the 'net, but nearly always via mobile (usually 2G). The issue, though, was cost of data download (hence restricted myself to email only). I can think of a huge number of functions and mashups (incl indirect services such as social nets etc) that could exist if yachts could be networked online on broadband at a low cost, and these too will no doubt come.

...and all seems well. We'll be playing with the new features in the latest release, hopefully our capricious captcha "feature" will be fixed.

So Dave Winer got fed up with not getting enough tech product news and built his own memetracker, Tech Newsjunk. Sez Dave:

I created the site because I wasn't getting enough news about products. It's that simple. I'm interested in the other stuff too, the finance, trends, parties, puppets -- but that's adequately covered on TechMeme. What wasn't getting through is the stuff I, as a product developer, care the most about -- news about products. And the interesting new products I'd find wouldn't make it onto the bus. If it got bought by Google or Microsoft, that would likely show up on TM, or if a VC invested a lot of money in it. But I like to find out when things are small, before other people invest.

So off to the site we trots, and lo an behold, there on page 1 is news of another memetracker, PolyMeme's launch on Read Write Web:

Polymeme is a hybrid system. Its front page is determined by a group of editors who pick the most interesting stories to be featured on the site from the pool of popular stories in the blogosphere as determined by Polymeme's memetracker back-end. This memetracker is never fully exposed to users, but the 'Popular Memes' section is determined algorithmically.

Because Polymeme only has a limited pool of editors, it can take some time for a story to appear on the front page. As Evgeny pointed out to us, though, having editors look for stories that would otherwise stay off the radar is 'a feature, not a bug.' Also, Polymeme argues that while the tech blogosphere moves very fast, other blogging verticals move a lot slower. In general, the site refreshes every 2-3 hours.

And there, buried under the New Media heading, is a page of news that would not look amiss on TechMeme where I got the Dave Winer story from.

Ah, the (re)curse of memetics.....

Objections are emerging to Google's Street View, a service that matches photos of locations to maps, including passers-by who were captured as the photograph was taken. The BBC notes that:

Privacy International, a UK rights group, believes the technology breaks data protection laws.

"In our view they need a person's consent if they make use of a person's face for commercial ends," said Simon Davis of the group.

Street View has already been launched in the US and includes photos of streets in major American cities. Photographing of areas in the UK, including London, is believed to have started this week.

Furthermore.....

If the group does not get the answer it seeks within seven days, Mr Davies said it would write to the Information Commissioner seeking a suspension of the service in the UK.

"We've spoken to Google in the past about this and received a snide response telling us to look more closely at their blogs.

"We've been told by engineers at Google that the technology is not ready to be deployed."

In the US it is legal to take photos of people on public streets. But Mr Davies believes that because Street View is being used for commercial ends anyone in the UK who appears in the photo needs to grant his or her consent.

I thought that was also true in the US if company logos etc are photographed, my understanding is that this makes quite an issue for rights clearance in the US for movies.

Must say, when I think whether I want the entire world to be able to look at my house iI don't embrace the idea with glee, there is a feeling that an element of privacy is being compromised. I loved Google Earth when it came out, but at its level of magnification - to date anyway - it seems more private. Its a very interesting area and thus should be - in my view anyway - tested in court just so some form of agreement can be hammered out, or else you can imagine a number of abuses can be added to it.

Interesting story today on RADAR about Gawker Media cutting revenue per impression for its hacks even while revenue and traffic increases:

....the per-employee traffic isn't that much higher than it was a year ago. And yet the site traffic is up more—meaning the site is receiving more income that the company doesn't have to share with a writer. The site received 16.7 million pageviews in June. Only about 6 million pageviews of that traffic is attributable to writers currently being paid. So why is the company cutting the costs of staff pay, when it isn't forced to cut in writers for 10 million pageviews in the month?

One of my frustrations with many of the journalists covering the new media / tech space is their very cursory understanding of economics, which means that all sort of hype and cr*p gets picked up and reported on uncritically, so it is with a certain wry amusement I read this

The issue is that unlike print where yellowing copies of last weeks' newspapers are good only for fish and chip wrappers, Digital Media is persistent, ie that stuff written 10 years ago by people long gone is still garnering traffic, and as time goes by this rises - as shown in the diagram below:



So, in a CPM based Ad serving model, as time goes by the proportion of money a site earns from current output reduces, while the money earned from existing back-catalogue output increases - so that after a while by far the majority of its income is potentially coming from media already written. (There is a "half life" to old material, but if you model it you find say 5 years of Old stuff has a large presence at fairly low visit levels - you are essentially building a larger and larger "long tail" )

At this point a bit of game theory analysis does not go amiss - given that the historical content is lower cost to the owners, as they don't have to pay out the original writers (assuming all content rights belong to owners and there is staff turnover over time ) then the reliance on the existing writers diminishes. Those who pay the piper call the tune, but if you don't even have to pay the piper 'cos you've kept the tune.....

For writers to reduce this tyranny of persistence they either (i) need to keep the right to their own historical material (unlikely, as per page payments would reduce) or (ii) current writers must make contracts that take a share of historical traffic (harder and harder to do as reliance on them reduces). Otherwise its this way to Digital Sharecropping.....

There is a second impact of Ad based media paid by the page, which is that by definition "populist" stuff is better rewarded - so expect more sleb slavering and political polemics - and niche stuff is not, so for example balanced reporting on complex issues is a route to starving in the garret.

So anyway, next time all you online hacks wax lyrical about FreeConomics or that the New Media defines a New Economic Paradigm, take a look at your own pockets and note that same New Economics is thinning them out via some very Old Rules, that was well understood in that most deeply unfashionable of places, the Main Stream Media.

Oh, and you may want to look up a guy who sussed a lot of this about 150 years ago. Name of Marx......

(Update - another take on it here by Jason Calacanis - expands on the above thoughts quite nicely....)

Steve Rubel's comments on free-agents ruining the larger analysts' party:

Charlene Li, an influential Forrester analyst who tracks digital trends, blogged that she is leaving the research firm to go independent. Some believe that the growing ranks of free-agent analysts may spell trouble for traditional research firms.

The reality is that many of the tools that workers need to do their jobs are becoming free or low cost. This extends into verticals as well. For example the Google Ad Planner, which launched last week, theoretically could allow anyone to become a nomadic media planner.

Digital Nomads are growing in numbers and they will create ripples.

We resemble that remark - after backgrounds in consultancy and digital broadband media we set up Broadsight 3 years ago as a 21st century business - virtual, very light footprint on the ground - because we could! In 2005 you could already get, via the Web, access to the sort of data that a few years before required large in-house research departments and/or copious analysts reports. Four years ago being web workers was much harder, as many of the tools, from wifi, wifi PC's, software etc were unavailable. Now they are near ubiquitous. Thus, our "buy" side has seen a massive reduction in cost and increase in efficiency.

That same revolution expanded our sell side as well - via the company website, this blog, and other social networks we have a massively magnified reach compared to the % increase the Analytics companies have achieved. We happen to believe we know our sector as well, if not better than (m)any of them, and can afford to be more independent as well.

A typical Analysts report sells for $'000. We wrote one on Online Advertising last year because we were actually doing work in the space and thus felt we knew more than any analysts did, it sells for about 1/2 the price and we have sold a healthy number of them, but our costs are probably far lower so margins are probably comparable.

At the other end, the market for 4 pager briefings for $100 or so is probably also under severe threat when you can just put a few good bloggers in that field together. Because the data is now so much more readily available, its much simpler for a smart person who knows the industry well to spend a bit of quality time on the Web, Linked In and Excel and get the 80/20 of the Analysts job done.

Steve's point on recessions driving trends - especially where there is economic advantage - also resonated:

Recessions often accelerate social shifts that are already percolating under the surface. One of the key trends I have been watching is the growing number of Digital Nomads.

Its simple Coasian Economics - as transaction costs come down, the size of the firm required to deliver a service reduces. I've yet to see an analyst's report say that about their own industry though

PS I liked Steve's title so I sto.. I mean adapted it

YouTube users are the losers in the carve up between YouTube (Google) and Viacom. The NYT is one of many reporting the issue, but this says it well:

the judge’s order, which was made public late Wednesday, renewed concerns among privacy advocates that Internet companies like Google are collecting unprecedented amounts of private information that could be misused or could unexpectedly fall into the hands of third parties....

....Google’s lawyers asked their counterparts at Viacom to agree to allow Google to remove information from the data that could potentially be used to identify individuals.

The legal judgement is a red herring - this is the fundamental issue: there is no good reason for Google to collect the amount of user data it does, or retain it for as long as it does, in order to serve a YouTube video. By doing so it puts its own users at risk (not just from legal challenges but from all sorts of rogue behaviour), and thus if it is not yet Evil, it is far from being a Good Thing.

Read/Write Web hypothesises that email is in trouble over here:

Email is fundamentally great at substantial person-to-person communication. The following diagram illustrates why email is facing competition. It cannot effectively support broadcast (except for spam) and it's still poor at helping with tasks and projects.

Tools like Basecamp and Highrise from 37Signals are showing there's a way to better project management and CRM while leveraging information in emails. If the Twitter service stabilises it's likely to win over people permanently because of its simplicity and playfulness.

Social networks incorporate direct messaging and chats, making it easy for people to talk directly, bypassing email. These communications are easier than email; they're integrated into the flow and more accessible. To be fair, they're aimed for brief messages.

The increasing speed of our lives and global connectivity reduces the need for lengthy emails. If we're in touch more often, then we reveal less every time we talk. Shorter, more frequent exchanges are replacing the lengthier communication of the past.

There is a 2x2 matrix used to bolster the argument that appears to have no axes and in my view is wrong, and thus leads to the (in my opinion) incorrect conclusions above. To compare email with project management software is not comparing like with like, but the others are worth examining. Here is my matrix to (hopefully) explain things better:



Once we used email to do nearly all these roles, then along came the Web and took over the broadcasting role, IM took over 1-1 fast conversation, Wikis were better highly modifiable collaborative ware and latterly microblogs have started to do the low grade broadcast role.

These other approaches in the diagram are most effective at their outer corners - the main issue as I see it is that email can do most of the tasks that the other approaches do, but is not optimised for any one of them. Thus what we see as the "failure" is more the rolling back of a an early technology from places it was at best a "make do".

Also, because of its age it is more spammed than the later systems - as they become ubiquitous they too will attract spam, but most people don't realise that.

The problem all the other systems have is as they move off their outer corners they too start to look less useful than email in its home turf of the middle ground, and as they become more spammed they will feel the same frictions. Also, email browsers have not really had many "web 2.0" upgrades - no picture avatars etc - and I am sure these revamps will make it "feel" more modern. In fact it amuses me to note that as Twitter, IM etc add more manipulable functions they start looking more like email systems, and as blogs and broadcast websites become more interactive they start to look more like email groupware.

The other thing that is important about email, that is not yet hitting the headlines, is that the directory is yours and its private, whereas in many of these other systems, someone else owns the social network. This we believe will become a bigger and bigger issue as privacy abuse and spam through these more "social" media increases.

Update - nice graphic by Zoli Erdos looking at the various comms techs from the synch / asynch and functionality point of view - same conclusion.

For a variety of reasons* I was unable to attend 2gether08, but I have been able to be a Virtual Participant so far via a number of channels:

Firstly, the Mogulus Web TV feed - even when I can't watch it as I'm on other tasks, I can listen in. A switchable TV/ Radio service

Secondly, the Summize service taking feed from Twitter picking up the hashtag #2gether08

Thirdly. my personal backchannel - via Twitter, email, Skype - there are friends of mine there and we are batting comments back and forth.

What has been quite interesting is the experience of being able to not just consume the streamed media, but to comment and chat online to some of the people there in real time by using Twitter etc - it's been like passing a comment to the person sitting next to you.

This afternoon and tomorrow morning I have leaving ceremonies at my kids' school to attend, somehow I think that will be a major challenge to listen to 2gether08 live - not because of the technology, mind you - more the expectations in the situation. But of course, the media has persistence so I can time shift it.



* Work etc

Went to see Matt Biddulph and Matt Jones do a double act on Dopplr (Dopplgangers?) last night at the Design Museum. Dopplr has always interested me for 3 key reasons:

(i) Its a location based service - We've looked at these for clients (especially mobile clients) a number of times over the years, and by and large they have all underperformed hugely. Reason vary - lousy economics, intrusiveness, clunkiness. Thus its interesting to see how they are faring in this endeavour.

(ii) The social network they are building is for people who actually do want to meet - we have also done work on tracking services of various kinds, and again these have underperformed historically - ( I recall with wry amusement one focus group some years ago when parental enthusiasm for child tracking rapidly fell when it became apparent that any family adopting these would also have spouse tracking capability). Ditto, my experience of most SocNets is I don't mind friending some long-lost acquaintances, on the express understanding that I don't have to actually meet them.

(iii) Web 2.0 Design Disciplines - to me Dopplr are one of the poster children of the WebZen 2.0 design school, and its always interesting to get snippets of real life experience vs "the dogma"

Thus it is always interesting to study a company that is attempting both these service areas. Very interesting talk overall, some thoughts from the talk and chatting to the DopplMatts afterwards:

Is Dopplr a feature or a business? - Matt J noted that a few years ago it would undoubtedly have been a feature in someone else's portal, but the nature of the web now is that the whole web is an open portal in away, Dopplr is now a feature on this "metaportal" (my term). My take - I foresee the collation of these services with others such as Twitter to provide more vectors for the "social graph" to provide value.

On Scale and Scalability - the guys had made the point that Dopplr is aimed at the large scale - bouncing round the world - and not at the small scale (within cities etc) which they would hand off to others. My take - I get "getting what you do right" but if I were a funder and looking to scale it up over time, there must be a scale benefit from going small scale

Design of the Social Net - they have been very diligent with going from strong links out, and ensuring that unwanted links do not occur when exporting the Dopplr social graph outside. On this, Matt Jones pointed me to this slideset he had done earlier with Tom Coates which deals with the social net design thoughts - well worth a read.

Is Great Design more a UE thing or a Marketing thing? - answers have I none here, others have noted that great taste and Digerati acclaim historically is no guarantee of crossing the chasm ( Dopplr is like a software Apple, aesthetically beautiful ) but I also noted the guys talked about differentiation by getting many small details right - and that's the Japanese philosophy of Toyota et al

Great Design + Getting Little Things Right - is that the start of Zen and the Art of Software Maintenance

Incidentally, one topic that did come up over beer etc later on was the hardy perennial of "who owns my data" - ie why must Twitter, Dopplr, Flickr etc all have separate social graphs of their own. Prediction - big issue of 2009, along with how to program social nuance into social nets.

Suw Charman-Anderson blogs about an Andrew McAfee observation at Enterprise 2.0:

Andrew McAfee asked a deceptively simple question to a panel at Enterprise 2.0 last week, "If Enterprise 2.0 tools and approaches really are so beneficial and powerful, why haven’t they spread like wildfire?" He was surprised that no one fingered management as the culprits.

In their initial responses all of them identified users, not bad managers or inadequate technologies, as the biggest barriers to faster and deeper adoption of Enterprise 2.0. Entrenched practices and mindsets, some degree of technophobia, busyness, and the 9X Problem of email as an incumbent technology combine, they said, to limit the pace of adoption. These factors slow the migration from channels to platforms and necessitate continued patience, evangelism, and training and coaching....

....That is in fact what they were telling me, and I didn’t get the impression that they were just being diplomatic. They said that managers were just another category of users that needed to migrate over to new ways of working, and not anything more. In other words, the panelists hadn’t seen managers in their organizations actively trying to impede Enterprise 2.0.

Now Suw has written an interesting take on her blog on the failures of Managers which is well worth a read. I'd like to defend them a bit here in response, as we have worked with many CIOs over the years (even ones putting in Enterprise 2.0 tools) and know them to by and large be interested in new technology but also diligent and careful. We did a survey for a client earlier this year on adoption of a range of new technologies (incl E2.0). Some findings that may be relevant here are:

(i) SOHO/SMEs are adopting more than large corporates, faster, mainly due to cost benefits rather than any inherent superiority.

(ii) In quite a few cases the tools are felt to be less robust than commercially available ones - and the O/S support model has its limitations in real operating environments, which worries CIOs who are on the hook for reliability, uptime, data security etc as well as functionalty. Can you imagine basing your UC strategy on Twitter for example? Great functionality, lousy uptime.

(iii) Many larger companies already have existing "good enoughs" - ie why would the IT support X 2.0 when they already support say Lotus Notes. Especially as Notes comes with SLAs

(iv) Most of the CIO's we met were not against E2.0 per se, but as Ian Betteridge noted in the comments on Suw's article, they are very interested in ROI - and that's total lifecycle ROI - and are worried that they have to fill in the support costs as so little is provided by the (small, often flaky) supplier companies.

(v) CIO's have to manage risk and balance the risk of not doing the New Thing soon vs the risk of going down the wrong path too soon. The wrong path cost is often huge, so they tend to hold back until some form of standard / consensus emerges.

(vi) In fact what CIOs wanted was more unbiased information on what works, what doesn't etc - they felt that there was a lot of hype out there and not a lot of fact backing much of it up - bitter experience tells them to do small pilots in areas where they can see a real need, and wait and see what survives the initial hype.

If you look at the latest adoption predictions by Forrester, Gartner, Analysys etc you can get more nuances of this sort of view too. Companies are not against the new tools, but typically its not the most pressing need they have right now. The CIO game theory here is simple - failure to adopt potentially useful new technology fast enough = lose a bit of karma with the Digerati, whereas failure to keep the infrastructure delivering BAU reliably = lose job. Game over.

Also, most CIO's have been around the block often enough to know that fast following with stuff that works pays off better than very early adoption.

Our take - its easy and convenient to blame managers, (and it was ever thus, just as it was ever thus that there are consultants beating the drum - MRP, ERP, 4GL, CRM...the list goes on) but their barriers to adoption are both rational and systemic. In fact, as one of the commentators observed this systemic replacement has been noted before in technology adoption:

The 15 year adoption rule for technologies has been mapped to introduction of: relational databases, 4GL, client-server architectures, case tools, mobile computing and many more. There are academic studies that might be of interest (it's not an arbitrary "rule" like sod's law or the peter principle).

Its also easy and convenient to exonerate users, or paint them as the go-ahead groovy types fighting against The Man and The System - but we've been implementing technology in enterprises for c 20 years now, and like anyone who has done this for a while we can bore for England on how impatient / ignorant / self serving / stupid / negligent / arrogant / well meaning / ordinary (insert your epithet) users can really f*ck up even the simplest systems - and there are a lot of them (yup, and some of those users are Managers ), and one tends to forget most are not Digerati - heck, most of them only use Apples for iTunes

And don't even mention all the virusses the little bleeders introduce into the company networks if you don't lock their systems down

Boring, I know, but our findings match those on the panel.

(Afterthought - there is a whole 'nother issue I want to write about regarding social media in Enterprises, and how enterprise real life social networks, which are hierarchical, do not map to the ones modelled in consumer Socnets, but that is for another day)

The perennial “Spot the Twitter Business Plan” game took an interesting turn today. There is an argument on Silicon Alley Insider, the thinking being that its Universal Comms nature and simple transaction messaging structure makes it ideal for a multi-media small value payment service.

If Twitter had a P2P payments system in place today, it would become the most used mobile payments system overnight. Having the ability to send a message like “p(ay) @broadstuff $5″ for that beer I just bought you would integrate seamlessly with the way Twitter’s users already interact with their system.

Layering on a payments system would not only make the feature instantly used, it would position Twitter to revolutionize how money is collected and exchanged on the Internet. (Think of what Twitter’s done for flashmobs and how it could effect fundraising.)

The argument is also the Twitterers are well used to using coding to enact various transaction messages, so why not transactions too:

One of the most missed facts in the mobile payments space is that users of a system have to be comfortable communicating using machine language. This is to say, one must remember and follow certain semantics so the system knows how much you’re paying and to whom.

Twitter users are already trained in this important action. Every time a Twitterer uses the “@,” “d” or even “#” to direct Twitter or annotate the messages it sends through the system, people are using the exact sort of machine language they’d need to use for mobile payments to work.

Interesting idea – the obvious thought is to link it to Paypal. That way eBay could integrate it with Skype as well and maybe finally create some value there.

Even more interesting that the concept of actually paying for extra services is still unmooted - judging by the wails when it goes down, you would have thought a small fee for say 100+ followeds would not be out of the question?

Update - comment by Mike Dopp via Twitter:

Wouldn't say I would pay for it. However I would not mind google ads or others to pay for hosting and bandwidth costs

In hindsight I think this is on the right track.....

This year's Reboot theme was Free, a subject I have some views about. I couldn't make it, but have followed with some interest. Here are a few of the blogs covering the things I found interesting, plus some of my comments. I find many commentators critiquing these new ideas don't go far enough - this post, on the other hand, probably goes too far

New Thoughts in Social Media:

1. Jyri Engestrom on Nodal Points (blogged by David Weinberger). Jyri is imho one of the structured thinkers in the Social Media space (which is sadly far too full of neo-hippies, snake oil salesmen and general fluffbrains) and talks about how this all ACTUALLY WORKS. He has pushed his concept of social objects - ie reasons for connecting but expressed in codifiable form - forward to nodal points, which are connection nodes in the social matrix where information is stored and which can give peripheral context

“Imagine a physical world where we have as much peripheral information at our disposal as in WoW.”

Like Jyri, I've been fascinated for awhile about how we can leave context data at key point in data matrices and have it pop up where / when needed - so more thinking on this is welcome!

2. Don Stowe Boyd follows the whuffie factor to its endgame and argues that the cosy nostrums of warm fluffiness will be more like the cosa nostra of the Mafia. Its not all sunshine and flowers..... (more of this below)


FreeConomics

3. Jerry Michalski on Free (as found reported by Dieter Rappold in one of the few good overviews of the sessions I found)

On the second day Jerry Michalski also talked about different free business models based on the Article of Chris Anderson in the Wired Magazine:

1. Freemium (Flickr)
2. Advertising (Google)
3. Cross Subsidies (donate CDs, have packed concerts)
4. Zero Marginal Costs (digital goods)
5. Labor Exchange (digg, Amazon Reviews)
6. Voluntary Donations (A throusand friends)
7. Pay what you want (TerraBite)

- He showed us also that so much can be done for so little - Craig Newmark shook up 3 industries of billions and billions with craigslist: Yellow Pages, Classifieds, Directory Services! No wonder given the fact that 60% of the internal cost at Telecoms are histrocial costs for legacy systems and billing processes. If one could get rid of that! We got told in business schools that Scarcity = Value. But we increasingly see a growing abundancy mentality.

As Dieter notes, the risk is that:

Todays abundance of Music/Content/Software imposes an important question: Why pay before I know that it’s good? That means we have to be famous first - then get rich!

Which is a Zipfian economy model - ie a very small number of people get very rich (and the advantage goes to those already famous on Record Company money), but most get very little, even with tiny talent differentials.

Also, as you can also see, few of the above models are actually Free, they are Offset models, wherein someone else pays for the free lunch - and herein lies the mental sleight of mind in the FreeConomy. This sleight of mind leads to risky errors, such as:

4. Working for Free - An argument about the freedom of free work (Last seen in large numbers c 1970's), fine thesis except for the small flaw that unless you have a trust fund you either (i) moonlight from your daytime job, (ii) have to trust others to feed you or (iii) you go for the "starve in a garret" mode.


Impact of Low Transaction Costs on Organisation / Social Structure

5. J P Ragaswami (Confused of Calcutta) made the basic point about ease of arbitrage in a low transaction cost world - “for every artificial scarcity there will be piracy. It will be destroyed.”

6. Traci Fenton on Democratic Organisations - 10 democratic Design principles (again thanks to Dieter for the list):

1. Purpose + Vision
2. Transparency (open book management)
3. Dialogue + Listening
4. Fairness + Dignity
5. Accountability
6. Individual + Collective
7. Choice
8. Integrity
9. Decentralization
10. Reflection + Evaluation

7. Lee Bryant (Headshift) on freeing the Battery Human. Dieter's report:

And asked how we can codify freedoms and values to provide longevity to them. Ironically we are stuck in the concepts of Max Weber and Frederick W. Taylor. But the consumerisation of Enterprise IT is a big chance to change that. Given the fact that Taylorism is simply too costly in complex, global ever changing market. Social Networks combined with weak ties are a efficient corporate immune system - whistleblowing when things go wrong.

I must admit to being hopeful, but also fairly sceptical about this sort of thing in any large scale organisation, firstly for the reasons of organisational complexity explained well over here by Dare Obasanjo:

There is less politics at a startup. In any activity where humans have to come together collaboratively to achieve a goal, there will always be people with different agendas. The more people you add to the mix, the more agendas you have to contend with. Doing things by consensus is OK when you have to get consensus from two or three people who sit in the same hallway as you. It’s a totally different ball game when you need to gain it from lots of people from across a diverse company working on different projects in different regions of the world who have different perspectives on how to solve your problems.

.....if you do the maths, you find that the number of transactions you need to get anything done in a peer only, dis-organised structure is huge and grows geometrically as you add people - and thus soon becomes unsustainable (the downside of Metcalfe's Law). This is the reason hierarchies come into being, Taylorist get on the job etc - to reduce the messaging and complexity. National "democracies" are in fact very hierarchical by definition, and if you go through Traci's 10 points you'll find that most of them are precisely what we criticize those in power for not doing!

Secondly, the thing less talked about in Social Media is that it operates under power law maths - the Zipfian economy I refer to above - ie, without checks and balances a few rich get richer faster, and the rest are worker drones. This is just another way of saying "Feudal". There is a long tail, but it doesn't necessarily wag the Big Dogs. Thus, seductive though this all sounds in the "sunshine and flowers" way its usually painted, it just does not actually work this way without very careful design. (Don't get me wrong, its possible - see Ricardo Semler's work here for example - but its non trivial to do and its not a "Social Media" thing per se - so caveat emptor!)

Exacerbating that, the laws under which public companies operate force a level of Corporate Evil (yes, even Google) that probably needs to be tackled before peace, love, brotherhood etc breaks out - if not, its more likely just a California Cult scam to make you feel good while being reduced to digital sharecropping.


Other Stuff

Nicole Simon has a whole lot of video interviews over here. There is also Twittering ad nauseam on reboot10 etc etc. It is interesting that as these tools increase in use, the content creators are doing far less long style blogging (at least it was far harder to find it about Reboot10 ).

Now my problem with this is that I just don't have time to listen to N linear video interviews and try to make sense of a plethora of loosely connected twts (Stowe Boyd usefully edits those of his talk on his blog page) - I think the issue with these tools is that they shift the attention time from the creator to the reader, and that is hugely inefficient. Not only that, but I can't do that copy/paste thing to create my own content as easily - so its far less user-friendly for me as a potential amplifier / echo chamber.

Hopefully more people will blog this week so more of the sessions can be linked in here (add any you know of in the comments too!).

All that being said, its great that things like Reboot happen, and I hope to be able to add my (irreverent) contributions next year

Michael Arrington rails against Twitter and praises Friendfeed over here, arguing that there has been a less infuriated response to the switchoff of the replies feature:

So why aren’t people screaming about the feature being gone? Because this time, they’re just heading

over to Friendfeed to have those very same conversations. Friendfeed for most users was just a place to bookmarks all their activities on other social networks. Now, more and more, it’s a place that people start conversations. The early adopters got that a while ago. Now, the not so early adopters are using it as a Twitter replacement, too.

He's wrong of course - the reason there is no sturm und drang is because its another opportunity to enjoy viewing the iconic Fail Whale:



Its on T shirts, posters, coffee cups - without a Fail Whale, Friendfeed cannot succeed

The thing about Twitter is it also has a huge user base, go elsewhere like Friendfeed and you have far fewer people to talk to. The A-List Broadcasters clearly want this to happen methinks (listen to ME, not each other) but thats not by and large what most people want - or are doing. As a number of commentators noted on the TechCrunch article in fact, using a simple service to increase Twitter persistence, such as Summize, is a far better option.

(Also, I don't understand why people think that a system with the same properties plus bigger messages will scale any differently? Twitter at least has $15m now to build out the new systems)

There is an interesting discussion going on on Slashdot - Chris Anderson's long tail being pulled by an HBR article potentially debunking his Long Tail thesis, (update - its made the WSJ now - this one hurts) though Chris's view is that one person's head is another's tail:

The best example of this is in what she describes as a growing "concentration" of sales around a relatively small number of blockbuster titles. In the Rhapsody data, she finds, the top 10% of titles (out of more than a million in that data sample) accounted for 78% of all plays, and the top 1% account for 32% of all plays. That sounds pretty concentrated around the head, until you reflect, as she notes, that "one percent of a million is still 10,000--[...]equal to the entire music inventory of a typical Wal-Mart store."

Actually, the Long Tail has been around for as long as inventory has been stored, the basic maths was done in the last century in the early days of statistics (Pareto ring a bell?). The obvious points made are that:

The whole premise of the Long Tail idea is that it's NOT a hassle for internet companies like Amazon and Apple to keep the low-volume stuff in inventory. That's what gives them an advantage over brick and mortar. If Amazon only sells 5 copies of the The "Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More" a year, it only needs to keep 5 in inventory. If a chain store wants to sell the book it has to keep hundreds in inventory to ensure they have at least one in each store.

A lot of people mis-characterize the Long Tail as "making money by selling obscure stuff." That's only half of the definition. The other half is building a business where it does not cost you anything to keep lots and lots of obscure things in inventory, or alternatively, having access to millions and millions of customers, so if you sell to 1% of your market, it still adds up to something. Long tail does not work unless all of those 1% niches add up to 80% of the total market or unless you sell to 1% of a billion people. The internet helps businesses do both of these things.

There is one real concern I have of Long Tail theory, which is that another impact of low transaction cost networks is you get positive return dynamics, ie the rich get richer - faster - and I've not seen a convincing argument as to why this dynamic doesn't occur as the endgame in any Long Tail initial condition system.

This discussion however was my favourite:

(Person One) But then try to explain porn websites. There is a lot of tail to be hit there.

(Person Two) And lots of head too...

I love Slashdot discussions, there is a rigour and sharpness, as well as irreverence, that I think is missing in social aggregators such as Friendfeed. I'm not sure why......