First, readers are smarter than most journalists give them credit for; Second, thanks to blogs and such, they’re getting smarter. The thing about the new information economy is we all have to be smarter, and that’s happening, because we’re largely on our own for filtering news and opinion. I, for one, thing that’s a good thing. It’s actually BETTER for democracy.
- Howard Owens in a comment on The L.A. Times responds

Michael Skube is having a fit about the demise of what sounds like beautiful, beeeaaauuudiful journalism in Blogs: All the noise that fits.

The more important the story, the more incidental our opinions become. Something larger is needed: the patient sifting of fact, the acknowledgment that assertion is not evidence and, as the best writers understand, the depiction of real life. Reasoned argument, as well as top-of-the-head comment on the blogosphere, will follow soon enough, and it should. But what lodges in the memory, and sometimes knifes us in the heart, is the fidelity with which a writer observes and tells. The word has lost its luster, but we once called that reporting.

Who’d have guessed that he’s describing journalism in the above?! Skube reads like an old journalist pro (and I use that word in the loosest possible sense) who bemoans the fact that his hard-earned ‘right’ to be published is being trampled upon by the barbaric hordes of bloggers. Well, the Big Editor in the Sky is no longer, there is just the internet with the online equivalent of printing press. With distribution bundled in. The bargain of the millennium. But the likes of Skube want to convince the world (or what’s left of those who haven’t taken to blogging) that this is bad for the luxury brands of MSM. We already know that, Michael. The real luxury is not having someone like you misrepresent what people are, do and mean by your selective ‘fact-sifting’, out of context quoting, and sloppy reporting. I am not accusing Michael Skube of such practices here, I’ll leave that to Ed Cone, I am targeting the entire profession here. I am an equal opportunity ranter.

It always amuses me – right after it annoys me – how his type (Andrew Keen et al) only trawl through the bad stuff online and construct their argument around the worst they can find. Granted, nowadays they find a parenthesis or two to reluctantly admit that bloggers have some influence.. but no matter, if things continue this way, we are all dooomed. DOOOOMED! Well, yeah, dude.

Instead of supporting their arguments about the plebeian nature of the blogosphere and the rubbish we are all inundated with, they merely demonstrate their lack of skill in navigating blogs and finding the daily gems. So Jay Rosen of PressThink put together a blowback that’s worth bookmarking – a collective effort of many to list examples of a blogger doing a journalist’s job. It has also been published in LA Times. For the record.

This is ridiculous:

Police officers arrested a man on suspicion of stealing a wireless broadband connection after spotting him using his laptop in the street.

The move is the latest example of police cracking down on a crime that did not exist several years ago when wireless internet access was relatively rare.

Using an open wifi is insecure and potentially dangerous enough without the police getting involved. This is user beware kind of thing and it really doesn’t help to have governments creating laws to that effect. They are notoriously clueless when it comes to the internet (or indeed anything).

Techdirt points out:

If the guy isn’t physically trespassing and the owner of the WiFi has it open, then what’s the problem? You can’t assume that the owner wanted it closed. If they did, they would have closed it. It’s the access point owner’s own fault if they’re not securing the WiFi. Since all it is is radio waves, we’re again left wondering if police will start arresting people who use the light shining from inside a house to read something out on the street. After all, that’s basically the same thing: making use of either light or radio waves that were emitted from within the house, but are reaching public areas.

So what about companies like Fon? Or about all the wifi enabled phones and handhelds?

Last night Hugh and I were talking, amongst other things, about hierarchies and their impact on individual’s autonomy or sovereignty as he calls it. And, predictably, how the internet has changed what has been long accepted as the balance of power between the individual and institutions. These things never far from my mind, a few thoughts struck me as I watched a couple of episodes of the series Rome.

These are examples of how power, rules and resulting hierarchies create environments where individuals have no real autonomy by default. In the first one, Vorenus has his ability to make moral decisions (i.e. based on what he considers right and wrong) denied to him. In the second, Caesar’s outrage at the death of his enemy is not about Pompey but about the disrespect to the office that lent this particular wretch significance above other human beings.

The third is about duty. Duty is important, often deeply embedded in people to follow a particular rule that usually makes sense on some level – either evolutionary or social. It is however designed to protect the system, rarely the individual. I am not attacking the sense of duty that comes from individuals themselves but the kind of duty often invoked to subdue them, namely duty to follow orders. Without autonomy, that kind of ‘virtue’ is just another tool in the tyrant’s toolbox. It took a collectivist horror for the European societies to realise that it is morally inadmissible even for the armed forces to follow orders, abrogating humanity.

Hierarchical systems and institutions take over people and hollow out anything that is individual to replace it with their own trinkets – position, status, power, money, influence, resources. People are defined by what position they hold, by the family they are born into, by people with greater power than them and finally, if they are lucky, by their decisions. Such systems with centralised or unchecked power attract people who wield it enthusiastically and ruthlessly. Using that power, in exchange for perpetuating the system, they shape others to its rules. Nasty things become possible in the name of the system… It’s one of the ways power corrupts.

Institutions and systems go through life cycles, often imploding by themselves or getting overthrown by new, more eager ones. If they survive it is by striking a precarious balance, by giving people just enough freedom to prevent rebellion. Judging from history, it doesn’t seem that much is needed. Fortunately, there are always individuals who push for more autonomy and so the struggle continues.

Top down hierarchies are mechanisms for implementing centralised power. Their rules are a shorthand for the power structure and a substitute for knowledge of how things work, understanding of consequences of people’s actions and impact of their decisions. How many times have you heard – well, if I let you do this, then everyone would want to do that and where would that lead? This is an admission of suppressed individuality. It is disguised as respect for others, when it fact it is merely ‘respect’ for the ways things are within the system.

When people exercise their autonomy more freely they start seeing consequences of their actions and/or indifference to them. In centralised power systems, you cannot have an action without the system being involved. The action has to be assessed and judged to see if it follows or breaks the existing rules. And an appropriate action as mandated by those rules is then taken.

In a distributed environment that is not possible. Or desirable. A network is such an environment. What is so wonderful about the internet, amongst other things, is that it is demonstrating how a greater autonomy, freedom and fewer restrictions on individuals lead to a more connected and increasingly social place. The old collectivist chestnut that with greater emphasis on the individual comes atomisation of society is just that. It certainly does not stand comparison with the explosion of connectivity, innovation and creativity fuelled by individuals having access to technology and tools that were until recently in the domain of businesses and governments.

And for the likes of me Chris Locke’s memorable outburst from 1995 still reverberates:

And I sit here and some of what I’m hearing is how to work in the system. Well I say fuck the system — it’s dead it’s stupid it’s non-responsive it’s counter productive it’s fucking socially evil and if we put any more of our goddamn time into propping up these dead-ass morons we deserve what we fucking get…. We’re not going to work in
the system because THE SYSTEM DOES NOT WANT US.

This is too good to miss. For my geek friends.

We have to move away from the mindset in the article, which represents the economics of scarcity, to one which represents the economics of abundance. We have to move, more particularly, away from models which create artificial scarcities in order to support economics-of-scarcity structures.
- JP Rangaswami in More musing about open multisided platforms

This is one of those snippets in business news and reports that occasionally surfaces, bobs around and then is overwhelmed by the ‘real’ business issues. Employee satisfaction – translation: people enjoying what they do for living – is the most important business issue. That is how innovation, good service, and organic growth of company happen.

The figures, based on an online survey of 984 people, also suggest that only 43 per cent of people are content with their career progress, while the biggest drop in satisfaction was found to be in the degree of autonomy permitted to staff.

Autonomy – who’d have thunked it?! Joanne Hindle of Unum, the company that did the survey, confirms:

…salary alone is not a sufficient means of addressing employee unhappiness, adding that “benefits, work-life balance, an employee’s sense of autonomy and company culture also have a vital role to play”.

She should know what with her people friendly title of corporate services director…

This goes under the ‘no-shit-Sherlock category’.

Dave Winer on the fundamental problem with social networks:

…many people are tired of entering the same relationship information for lots of different social networks. I am one of those people. Maybe you are too. Maintaining this information is even more problematic, that’s why we tend to use one “current” social network, and leave a trail of moribund networks behind us.

I am one of those people and I try most networking applications I hear about – Flickr, Facebook, twitter, dopplr etc. I set up a profile pretty early on and observe what happens. So far, I haven’t found much use for them but that doesn’t mean other people don’t. I am also one of those people who clamour for more openness but as Dave points out social networking is valued in a way that acts against them opening their platforms.

There are enormous economic incentives for companies that run social networks to not let users of other networks access their services. Shareholder value is a function of how many users they have, how they are “monetized” and how hard it is to switch. The harder it is to switch, the more money each user is worth. Any exec that did anything to decrease the number of users they control would probably be fired. So anything that depends on this isn’t very likely to happen, in existing networks.

I have had many conversations in the past few months about identity, openness (of platforms and networks), privacy and security. They come from different directions but they seem to meet in the same space – understanding that these should be driven by individuals aka users. And by the subtle and complex interplay between their behaviour and technology that enables as well as influences it.

One thing has become clear to me – the best way to get companies think differently about user data is to find ways to give more control over that data to the users themselves. As long users and their information is valuable to the point of negating any need for openness, companies will not shift. Take away or dilute that value and we have got a chance. This is where Project VRM comes in, starting with tools and applications that give users the ability to manage, share and otherwise manipulate their own data. My profiles no longer ‘owned’ by others, where my investment into building them transforms into reluctance to move at some later stage. This serves the platform owner, not me. (As a counter example, I love the way I can simply export my OPML file from an RSS reader and import it into a new one or into a blogroll on my blog or share it with someone else to kick start their own RSS reading habits.)

In his podcast, Dave talks about how an open network could work and how it could come about. He is right, it won’t come about ‘conceptually’ i.e. by someone designing it top down. It will be something simple, useful and usable – sort of like twitter. Perhaps, sayz Dave, we already have the building blocks for it. It will be something that users adopt easily and make it work in more ways than its designers imagined. This is because users are not standing still. They are learning and what they didn’t understand five years ago is now second nature to them. As very few companies are in touch with users, the new technology is rarely, if at all, determined by businesses. Or at least not by business as usual.

Hugh is taking the heat off his posting Why We’re all Blogging Less?:

Blogging isn’t dead. Far from it. It’s just a subset of something much larger and more important.

Indeed. So 2004 and we are still repeating it.

Been reading the Guardian’s Comment is Free columns. Tired of the “isn’t everything crap” ..stand back and wait for the backlash, format.
- ourman on Twitter

Earth to walled-garden builders: You can’t own customers for the same reason you can’t own slaves: they’re human beings, and they want to be free. Prediction: in Web 3.0, the best wall-less gardens will win.

And: Love is the ultimate lock-in.

Doc Searls

This is rather tricky.