-
About
-
-
Visitors map
May
4
Disintermediation of minds?
Filed Under Communication, Social web, Web/Tech, Media | 3 Comments
Commenting on the false rumour that Twitter is going off Rails, Tim Bray hits the nail on the head. Again.
If you want care about Twitter, follow @biz or @ev. If you care about Rails, follow DHH here or here or here. If you care about Sun, read what the people at Sun say. Same for IBM or Microsoft.
The internet is about disintermediation, and about zero distance:
The Net is a giant zero. It puts everybody zero distance from everybody and everything else.
One of the things that underpins what I do is getting across to individuals and companies that they don’t need the media. They can put their side of the story out there and do their best so that people follow them and hopefully trust them. The internet levels the playing field, power law notwithstanding.
One of few things that unites bloggers is linking to others and to their sources. So for any opinion, rumour, news or guess, there should be linkage supporting that view (only rants are excused from this requirement). Even most media commentators - after years of bashing from the blogosphere - are now linking to sources of their stories.
So given that we can follow the source(s), not just be at the mercy of the journalist or the commentator, why don’t we?
If you care about the Big New Thing that’s going to change your life, wait till it comes and touches your life. Then you’ll know what it’s really about, not what some overworked underslept Bay-Area meme-promoter thinks.
Perhaps now that the internet has disintermediated media, we need to disintermediate our minds. We rely on aggregators, top 100 rankings, meme generators and promoters. Sayz Tim:
The other problem with the aggregators is that there are a lot of smart, hungry, imaginative people working really hard to game them and get noticed. Sometimes it works.
Yes, we need to manage the flow of information that is growing by the day. We need some way of filtering the bits that we are interested in from the noise. But aggregation is not the same as filtering. Our way of handling information still dates back to the era where authority and approved sources made it easier, if not better in terms of quality of information and complexity. I have mainly media in mind here. We used a range of sources, not unlike a radar scanning a designated area, to see if anything new came up. The effort was considerable but limited by the scope and number of sources. Once that got out of hand, we started to lose the battle to contain the information - we either keep scanning faster or throw hands in the air saying that there is just too much information.
The internet is a network, so why not use its nature for information handling. Instead of a delineating a radar field, we can build a spiderweb of sources that will ’shake’ the web and alerts me when there is something of interest. Our feedreaders could be constructed that way - the nodes in the web, sources that filter for us and the points in between insider sources that we might be occasionally interested when something happens in their sphere.
There has been a proliferation of tools that help me aggregate but there are still very few tools that help me filter. Part of the reason may be that the human mind is the best filter of all but, surely, there is room for tools that can help me to it easier and better.
Note: I covered this more visually here (about 6 minutes into the video).
Apr
11
Facebook Anthem
Filed Under Social web, Tools and applications, Web/Tech, Trends | 1 Comment
Came late to this party, just found it on Johnnie’s blog. Rather apt I thought:
Apr
7
The five stages of customer relationships
Filed Under VRM, Social web, Advertising | Leave a Comment
How’s that for ‘user generated content’?! Eat your heart out, creative agencies. 
It is hard to maintain ‘it’s not us v. them‘ attitude when it is so easy to recognise and identify with the symptoms in the video…
Bonus link: Article by Knowledge Wharton Getting Engaged: Advertisers Search for Their Voices on YouTube
Apr
1
Creative destruction?
Filed Under Communication, Social web, Public relations, Business, Web/Tech | 4 Comments
There is a backlash happening against Creative, a company that:
told programmer Daniel_K to stop writing his own drivers for their X-Fi sound cards. The cards still won’t work on Vista over a year after the OS was released, because Creative hasn’t released drivers for them—but by Mr. O’Shaughnessy’s account, Daniel_K is “stealing” from Creative by making the cards work.
Geeky? You bet. Important? See what people say, the intensity and their actions and watch the ‘consumer‘ breaking out of neat demographics and managed spin.
The interesting aspect of this is that the company didn’t do anything that wasn’t their right to do. Copyright, IP, products, support and yet, what they have done stinks to high heaven of arrogance, complacency and of doing something very stupid in the age of the demand side can supplying itself - trying to reclaim their position of old where they are the only ones able to supply what they sell…
As a commenter on the Creative forum thread about this puts it:
Daniel may very well have stepped on some copyright rules, and Creative had the lawful option of doing what they did. Score 100 on the law, score minus several millions for not doing the job themselves in the first place, and putting someone like Daniel in a position where he had to do what he did, just to get the customers of this company happy.
The distinction between supply and demand, especially in the technology/software industry, is fuzzy. You want a community of developers helping your product or market or industry? Watch the edges of your kingdom stretch and flex until there is a kingdom no more and your best chance is to become the first among equals. And understand that is Good Thing.
Obviously, with the likes of Microsoft and Apple we are certainly not there yet. So let me just point out that if your business behaviour gets so glaringly overwritten by common sense, you have a problem.
The communications aspect of this case is equally interesting if not new:
Rule of thumb for bad news in the mainstream media: release it Friday so it’s buried over the weekend. Rule of thumb for the web: don’t infuriate thousands of your customers right before you decide to tune out for 48 hours.
this is now on the back of my business card as a useful reminder..
via dropsafe
Mar
25
What’s in a social network? A Facebook by any other name would be as useless… discuss
Filed Under Identity, VRM, Autonomy, Social web, Web/Tech, Trends | 2 Comments
A friend shared with me a link to this article about how pointless Facebook is.. and while we are at it the whole social networks malarky etc etc…despairing how some people around her are taking refuge, er, applauding wisdom contained within.
I am not an indiscriminate fan of social networks and some of Fabrizio’s gripes have a point especially the one about privacy… although he does come across as an old cranky, dare I say it, web-o-phobe. His objections against Facebook and social networks are not entirely unreasonable and from a personal perspective justified. I would just add that if others subscribe to them too enthusiastically, without further thought, I fear it says more about them, than the nature of social networking. So let’s have that further thought, shall we?
1. The whole thing of social networking is mere bullshit to me.
I would agree that Facebook is pretty pointless in terms of its applications and overall usefulness for a blogger geek like me is zero. However, that is a far cry from social networking being mere bullshit. It is a phenomenon that is worth noting and dismissing it will make you only more ignorant of what is truly happening.
Networking on Facebook, MySpace and other silos is like taking driving lessons. There is no recognisable direction. It seems kind of pointless unless you know that it is just learning and practising. Facebook and MySpace seems a lot like that to me. But once people work out how to drive, how to operate the machine and how to get from point A to point B, they will be able to decide what the B is and get around on their own. And that’s when the real fun starts.
2. It’s not the right way to communicate with my friends.
Again, half-right. Just because face to face is still hard to beat, doesn’t mean other ways of communicating are not useful or often better in some contexts, e.g. writing a book is a much better way of communicating one’s ideas, theory or sum of knowledge, then a series of chats in a bar… although it is usually a good start. I am a big advocate of online communications because it enables people to define their thoughts in ways they rarely get to do in an offline social context.
That said, Facebook is not an ideal place for that but it helps people to piece together a record of their life. Self-selected and therefore some might say ‘manipulated’ but as I am keen on people to learn about themselves and their identity, I see it as a feature not a bug. There is a post to be written about a stage when people discover that being themselves brings greater rewards than manipulation of their image, but that’s for another time.
Also, social networks are not pointless for communication with friends, if hardly of much use for early bloggers. It is great to find a long lost friend, knowing they exist is better than losing contact with them forever. And a phone is definitely not the best way of communicating either! Social networks enable one-to-many communication for individuals - unheard of before the age of the web unless you were a politician or an author or a celebrity - in short, had some sort of institutional backing whether politics or the media. I can communicate efficiently and persistently with people in my contact list and let them expand on that communication if they are interested.
The main issue I have about the statement that it’s not the right way to communicate with one’s friends is the subsequent presumption that a phone call or a chat in a bar are the right ways. Since that is the only ‘human’ ways people communicate?! What about the wonderful tradition of letter-writing? Is that not a worthwhile communication with a friend even thought it’s not in a bar or over the phone? This goes deeper to the nature and diversity of communication, which makes such utterances short-sighted or blinkered (check the appropriate box). Stinks of an old fart, if you pardon the pun.
There is no reason why we can’t develop ‘human’ dimension in our communications online equivalent to the meeting of minds we experience in human contact offline. Not much to do with social networks as such, see my point about ‘learning how to drive’ above. The way to get there is to differentiate carefully and correctly - and this is going to take some time methinks - between what bits can and should be automated, what bits can and shouldn’t be automated and which bits we have been forcing technology to handle inadequately. I think the serenity prayer sentiments apply just fine here too:
God grant me curiosity to use my brain where irreplaceable, the skill to design and develop technology to assist it and the wisdom to know the difference.
3. I don’t want others to know too many things about me.
I couldn’t agree more. Privacy is a fine thing and until we are the ones who determine what goes out and what stays in, it will be mostly a delusion. Our privacy is protected about the same way a pretty young girl is safe in hands of a pimp held in check by a few hastily drafted rules that are actually very hard to enforce. As long as he’s seen keeping his hands of her, he’s left alone. But she’s still at his mercy and there is not much she can do if he decides to sell her on. Substitute data and information about you and you’ve got the picture.
On the other hand we have the wonders of connectedness and sharing which are very fine things too. It’s what made the web what it is today (in a good way). So to hoard and isolate would be overshooting although the ability to do so should be part of the deal, if that’s what I chose. It is about the right balance and like in any balanced ‘relationship’ it takes two to tango. At the moment, my data is held ransom in an abusive relationship and the fact that I get ’something’ out of it, doesn’t justify the imbalance of power. I should be the one making a decision about - and bear the consequences of - what happens to my data and by extension to my privacy, not Facebook or any other silo or platform. The problem is we have no way of doing that. Yet.
Finally, as Alec is points out security is a policy and so is privacy - what is private to me, may not be to you and vice versa. So what sense can a uniform set of rules or system make in a decentralised environment where a) it is near impossible to enforce and b) the distributed and persistent nature of our communication makes privacy an awkward bolt-on when it should be integral to our behaviour. The more people learn what privacy means and understand its merits and the price of its abuse, the better ‘policies’ they can devise for themselves.
So back to my point about how social networks are the ‘learning wheels’ for our identity online. Social networking is not bullshit, just like driving in a parking lot of a driving school is not pointless. Just see it in the context of the web and the individual and the picture get more interesting, if also more tricky and longer term.
It is about ability to manage one’s own data and network. Even social networks built on closed platforms cannot diminish the first giddy experience of creating a profile that consists of more than a username and data serving the platform owner more than the user. It is the control, the flexibility, the fun and play, the ease of communication and technology that makes the whole experience dynamic and mildly addictive. At the moment, not much else matters to the users - that is why privacy and security is a nice to have, rather a must have. I believe that will change as people get accustomed to more control over their online environment.
I want to be there when they want something more - their own car and their own choice of the destination - to push the driving school metaphor to its limits. Cue VRM hoping to equip people with tools that enable them to take charge of their data, provide context for it, learn from them and pass the knowledge on as they see fit.
Mar
21
Data (r)evolution
Filed Under New models, Social web, Web/Tech, Events | 1 Comment
Hank William’s presentation at BarCampNYC3 last weekend was the most memorable as well as useful for what I am currently thinking about. Here is a reconstructed transcript from my notes taken during his talk. Any confusion or mis-representations are mine.
In my work I see the same problem solved again and again, focused on number of different things – this issue interesting – how we store data, how do we represent the data? Relational databases don’t look the way our data logic works, if you look at web 2.0 applications and how people are using them.
Relational databases are not good for knowledge as information over time cannot easily evolve to have a structure that didn’t exist when we conceived our application. For example, accounting system, you can design such an application and it’s going to stay that way. With web 2.0 you don’t know when you start what your business model will be and that makes such approach very limiting. Over the last few decades, technologically we squeezed every ounce of performance from technology. The main problem is that they are just very inflexible and brittle!
Why do relational databases have this problem? When you create it, a record is just a collection of information, contact record – first name, last name - you can have thousands of them. But if I want to connect two records, for example, an invoice (name client, field products etc) and another record (I want to track of the fact that if was or not paid), I am going to have keep a field (name of the company) and two tables (a record and a check) defined within that record from the start. So if I want to do something later, authorisation for example, another record, and if I were to relate the invoice to authorisation I have to point the check and relate it to that.
Basically, every time I want to create a relationship between two objects I have to modify the record. That is bad, it means that no object in a system can be stable and every time a new relationship I have to add something to the object in question. When you create your system, you have decide how you want the system to be. When you have 100,000 records and want to change something or evolve, this is a problem.
My favourite comparison of this kind of approach: a woman is having a child, a doctor walks in and says: “Before you give birth, can me give you the name of every friend your child will have or has in the life and by the way, we have got five minutes.
That’s what a relational database really requires. Once you have it set up, you can’t just start doing something even if it makes sense. That’s the problem.
The solution is social graph, a concept that Facebook made famous. You can have multiple objects - these could be invoices, or contacts on Facebook, they could be anything - and the graph is the connections between them. The great thing is that you don’t worry about what this is in order to create a connection. You don’t need to modify anything to create a connection. Every object stands on its own.
This is a fairly radical concept in data management, as we can not only connect these objects, we can also say ‘what’s the relationship?’. Directional (husband, wife) (friend to) if you can imagine all your data with relationships where you can connect the objects on the fly, it radically changes the nature of web 2.0 application.
You can also have another object, not just a contact, a restaurant, e.g. Nobu and the relationship is favourite. You create a new thing called restaurant and immediately we can connect John with Nobu with a relationship favourite. To do this in relational DB you’d have to create a new table and modify John so he has favourite restaurant field, and three more slots to John. It would be complicated and that’s not workable on the web as these are the kinds of relationships that we want to represent.
We always think about how to connect stuff in Web 2.0, this is the way this stuff works, something that’s connected by default. If I want to have an app mapping my restaurants I’d create a new information silo.
How do you connect data of disparate types – pictures in Flickr to a record in Facebook, the idea is to manage these relationships across the whole web. The concept of semantic web is great but I think as it’s right now is FAIL, it’s too complicated, not the way people do things.
Kloudshare – the idea is to be able to store data in the cloud, do relationship search, to query the graph and be able to access it from your web applications. Not to have to set up MySQL server.
There are other issues about social graph, it doesn’t map very well yet although the tools out there So far I don’t have the sense that there are off-the-shelf tools for scaling this stuff. But the cool thing about graph is that it allows for different types of user interface. You can actually create a bunch of user interfaces – a business card – you can represent it and the relationship between various business cards so you can see the graph. I can explore each item on the graph, look at Nobu and see all people who thought Nobu was great etc.
The idea is that from the UI perspective, it is a very simple unified web where you can look at relationship of any object and opportunity to think about data and knowledge and how are things related. It is a profound thing that any piece of information that you have you can stand from that point of information and see the whole universe…
Would love to know more about Kloudshare, sadly nothing came up when I googled it.
Mar
20
Quote to remember
Filed Under New models, Communication, Social web, Business, Quotes | 2 Comments
Why does listening to your customers sound like a web 2.0 idea? It should be a business 1.0 necessity.
- Jeff Jarvis in Starbucks listens - at last
Feb
14
Power to the Persons redux
Filed Under VRM, Open source/IP/DRM, Social web, Web/Tech | 13 Comments
I believe that VRM starts with you being able to take charge of your data - data that you want to capture, analyse and otherwise harness, both for fun or for usefulness.
At the moment you are the last person to be able to benefit from your data on various platforms and from your ‘digital detritus’ - information that others harvest and use for their own purposes. A site with tools like wesabe may give you the ability to gather and analyse some of your financial data, but you’ll need new tools - free from platform lock-ins - to repeat that trick with data regarding anything else about which you care and need.
Obviously, to make the most of your new-found data autonomy, you will also need to be able to communicate, share and transact that data with others, individuals and vendors.
So there are two foundation stones for the VRM vision as described above:
- the place where you store, manage and play with your data (working name: u-spot)
- the methods (protocols, standards, etc) for sharing, exchanging and distributing that information, if you so wish.
Having had many discussions on this matter I wanted to share some of the ideas they generated. With Alec’s technical expertise and support we were able to articulate a vision of how people could interact with vendors in a VRM manner using existing online technology - a white paper was born, rivetingly named “Feeds-Based VRM”: A Web-Centric Approach to VRM Implementation
The goals for this paper were to:
- invent as little as possible
- reuse only popular technologies, techniques and user-interface metaphors in order to enable VRM, and…
- provide maximal inclusiveness and extensibility to the VRM implementation, to permit the greatest potential for growth.
…and within these simple constraints we have proposed a simple, inexpensive, viable path for VRM u-spot implementation and information sharing, using familiar technologies such as blogs, feeds, ATOM, and RSS.
Technical outline: the feeds-based VRM concept is for you to be able to manage, manipulate and share information - e.g. hotels you have visited, flights you have taken, wines you have enjoyed - using a pluggable web-based software platform similar to Wordpress or Movable Type; however unlike those tools which deal with free-form blog posts, instead your data is be stored as objects (encoded in pertinent open-standards formats) which are then “shared” via secure, self-referential, closed and authenticated ATOM or RSS feeds that can be read, aggregated or further processed by “subscribers” whom you authorize via your “friends list”.
The effect is: your data is held in one place and is authoritative. Your subscribers can see it. When you change it, your subscribers will see the changes.
No longer will you need to tell people when you change your address. They’ll already know.
Notes:
Many thanks to Ben and Kevin for helpful comments. This is a contribution to an open source project to develop a web-centric VRM infrastructure.
The title reference is to the original post Power to the Persons!
Feb
12
Social cloud and the blue pill
Filed Under VRM, Social web, Tools and applications, Web/Tech, People | Leave a Comment
A great presentation by Kevin Marks on social cloud. The cloud is an abstraction that we create of the net. It is the perception of the network, the internet, by people who no longer see or need to think of all the piping and wires. Those are in the background, invisible to most of us.
There are several important points that Kevin makes but here’s a taster.
The younger generation doesn’t see the cloud, it experiences it as oxygen supporting their digital lives. The older generation sees this as a poisonous gas that has leaked out of their pipes, and they want to seal it up again.
Another important bit is the one about our brains and minds being the best social networking tools. Software cannot match out ability to sort out our friends and contact, establish how much we trust them and how we arrive at that trust. No software can fully map the relationships, let alone replace our natural ability to create and maintain them The implication is that therefore software should support the kind of cloud abstraction we have around the internet, also around our social relationships. You can feed it (the social networking app) relationships that are in the ’software in your head’, feed the stuff related to people in your network to software online. Users will assume that your software (this is aimed at developers) will be able to see the information that they have already fed into the software and be able to use it. (Please watch the whole thing as I hardly did full justice to Kevin’s talk.)
This skirts the edges of what I see in VRM - tools and software enabling me to take charge of my relationships by helping me with the data around them, their capture and manipulation. The cloud is abstraction of my relationships but before it recedes into the invisible strata I need to be able to breathe freely. The starting point is having healthy lungs and not having to worry about the tubes and the mechanics of breathing. And we are far from that.
At the moment, we are all connected to the matrix, with tubes still being more important than our freedom to move. The many silo-like platforms try to keep us hooked and locked in, whilst giving us enough delusion of capabilities. Alas, there is only so many times you can (super)poke or zombie someone before you start wondering what’s the point.
The point is I want to be able to hook or unhook myself at will. I want to be able to connect and create relationships without lock-ins (other than the ones that relationships bring with them naturally :-)). I don’t believe I will be able to do that unless the tools are built around me, for me and eventually by me. Blogging took off when people could set up a page and start publishing in a way previously available only to geeks with html skillz. Today I can do more things with my blog than just publish - tag, add videos, plug-in more functionality etc. with the underlying technology is invisible to me now.
I want tools and applications that will help me do that with my relationships (as social network platforms are rather inadequate for my purposes) and ultimately transactions.
One of the fundamental building blocks of VRM is the ability of individual users to take charge of their data instead of managing them via a platform and ‘trading’ that data for the functionality that the platform might provide. Once I have it in my hands, I can manage, analyse and whatever else I wish to do with them, applying various functionality directly. And share and interact with others in ways richer than platforms currently allow. It might be messier to start with but closer to human affairs in its complexity. And that is a Good Thing.
Apologies to Kevin for hijacking the cloud imagery.
Feb
8
Truth in advertising…
Filed Under Social web, Advertising, Funny | Leave a Comment
A collection of brilliant adverts. One slight glitch - they are truthful. Here are my favourites:
by inyarear
by Sanchez
Feb
8
Web 3.0
Filed Under Social web, Web/Tech, Trends | 1 Comment
Read/Write Web held a contest for the best description of Web 3.0. The winner was Robert O’Brien:
Web 1.0: Centralized Them. Web 2.0: Distributed Us. Web 3.0: Decentralized Me,” he wrote. “[Web 3.0 is] about me when I don’t want to participate in the world. It’s about me when I want to have more control of my environment particularly who I let in. When my attention is stretched who/what do I pay attention to and who do I let pay attention to me. It is more effective communication for me!
Excellent! Sounds familiar.
via broadstuff
Jan
31
Content is for container cargo business
Filed Under VRM, Journalism, Social web, Media | 3 Comments
Doc Searls on content in 2005:
The word content connotes substance. It’s a material that can be made, shaped, bought, sold, shipped, stored and combined with other material. “Content” is less human than “information” and less technical than “data”, and more handy than either. Like “solution” or the blank tiles in Scrabble, you can use it anywhere, though it adds no other value.
And again in 2007:
Stop calling everything “content”. It’s a bullshit word that the dot-commers started using back in the ’90s as a wrapper for everything that could be digitized and put online. It’s handy, but it masks and insults the true natures* of writing, journalism, photography, and the rest of what we still, blessedly (if adjectivally) call “editorial”. Your job is journalism, not container cargo.
Content is media industry term. The number of people talking about content grows every day as they assume roles that before only media could perform. With more tools and ways of distributing, photos, videos, writings, cartoons etc. are being ‘liberated’ from the channel world. Alas, often sliding into the platform and silo world. As far as I am concerned there are only two platforms - the individual user and the web.
-
London VRM meetings
