Context & Continuity

Strategy&Business: The Evolution of Technology.

   

Strategy+Business has been a little, interesting journal for the past few years.  One the one hand, it's the external house organ of Booz & Company, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that unless the house organ tends to be ... explicit ... about being a cheerleader when the content should speak for itself.  McKinsey makes a good journal too. 

This quarter we're treated to an interview with W. Brian Arthur.  Mr Arthur spent most of the 80s on the Stanford University / Santa Fe Institute nexus of the world and has now decided to spend all his time in Santa Fe. 

It appears the interview was triggered by the publication of Mr. Arthur's latest book, The Nature of Technology and How it Evolves. Here are a couple of pithy extracts that I hope will encourage you to buy the book: 

The economy thus isn’t something that contains a few technologies. The economy is its technologies and is an expression of its technologies — in the same way that an ecosystem emerges from its species. And if an economy consists of its technologies, then it automatically changes the moment you change any of the technologies. If a part of the legal system or venture capital financing is altered, changes reverberate throughout the entire economy, and not just in the parts of the economy most directly impacted by what has occurred. Any time a new species comes into the ecosystem, the ecosystem changes.

...

But I don’t think human beings are any faster at inventing these days than they were 100 years ago. Maybe more of us are working with technologies — there are more scientists and engineers. Maybe we’re better organized than before. But above all, what has changed is that we have much more to invent with. That creates a certain speed-up in innovation, but I’m not expecting this rate to accelerate to infinity any time.

...

But it’s not sufficient to have good scientists or good technical journals or even good universities, any more than it is sufficient to take a recipe book off the shelf to be able to cook Chicken Cordon Bleu. What’s more important is the implicit knowledge of what temperatures to use, and just how much to cook something.

The more advanced the technology, the more craft is required in innovation. Innovation is about shared knowledge: of how to deal with phenomena, of parameter values and what to do when things go wrong — knowing what new pathways to try and what things have already been tried so you don’t have to waste your time on them. And in the computer industry, much of that knowledge resides locally in Silicon Valley.

[link to entire article]

...and you're backing that up to a ...

And the point is...?

I found this eye candy on LifeHacker and followed the breadcrumbs back to the source, The University of California, San Diego.  It's an interesting study that was funded by AT&T, Cisco Systems, IBM, Intel, LSI, Oracle and Seagate Technology.  Seagate.  Right. 

Anyway, it's a theoretical question that's a bit interesting.  I guess Avatar takes up more disk space than Citizen Kane and Citizen Kane takes up more disk space than, say, the novel Gravity's Rainbow.   And so on.  So do we need more disk?  Personally, I'm up to about a terabyte of NAS for my family and that doesn't surprise me at all.  But on the other hand, we're rapidly approaching a new paradigm whereby one copy can be cataloged and accessed at anytime by anybody.  --Assuming infinite bandwidth.

By the way, I highly recommenced LaCie's NAS.  Has performed as expected over four years.  A dream.

One of the few people who really know what they're talking about...

... is David Strom.  Mr. Strom understands information technology from the bottom up and is a valuable person to know.  Mr. Strom writes a newsletter Web Informant which (and I'm giving away one of my trade secrets here) is an important missive to read to stay current on information technology's course and speed. 

Which leads me to his latest email newsletter that springs from an article published by the NYTimes on December 9 about the intersection of television  and the internet, something I wrote about here recently.  

So, the takeaway is this:  put David Strom on your reading list and watch with interest as television melds with computing.  Here's an ethical issue I'm dealing with this afternoon:  My daughter, a junior in high school, comes home and says she will receive extra credit for watching the move Dances with Wolves.  Do I pay Blockbuster to rent the DVD or download it from the blacknet for free?  It's a pretty good movie, but....   I guess since I've written this in public, I'll rent the DVD.  Besides, I'd rather not have that movie on my NAS. 

WSJ, 11.4.9: The Greatest Generation (of Networkers)

"The unspoken attitude is, 'I don't need you. I have the Internet,'" says P.M. Forni, the 58-year-old director of the Civility Initiative at Johns Hopkins University, which studies politeness and manners. "The Net provides an opportunity to play hide-and-seek, to say and not say, to be truthful and to pretend. There is a lot of communication going on that is futile and trivial."  [more]

William Gibson, one of my favorite authors wrote, “The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.”  And we can see it with our kids.  And, just because it's the future, doesn't mean that it's all ok. 

Google Wave: First Impressions.

For reasons unclear, I received a Google Wave invitation and, as I'm fascinated by collaborative technologies, I jumped in.  Thankfully, I know how to swim. 

Please let me relate to you three impressions I have about Google Wave:

1.    You wake up in what you think is a bed and you are surrounded by darkness.  Very carefully, you ease yourself out of the bed, find a wall and grope your way around the room until you find a doorknob. 

In other words, there isn't much about Google Wave that's instantly obvious.  One must spend some time with it, get to know it, and find the way. 

2.    For those with short attention spans, Google Wave may be completely useless or doesn't offer enough differentiation from a chatroom with cool tools and all singing dancing bears.  Let me illustrate:

The first picture is what Google Wave looks like for those of us married to ASCII.   As I wrote before, it's very much like suddenly appearing in the middle of a strange narrative.

And then there's always the very smart, very cool kid in class who knows how to turn the bunsen burner into a gas-activated handgun.  This video illustrates that:

But if we imagine using Google Wave over Time, then the benefits start to shine.  Time is very difficult to demo.  There are few substitutes for the real thing. Steve Wright once remarked, "Everywhere is within walking distance if yo have the time," and such is the truth.  I can see how a problem statement could kick off a wave.  I can see a marketing or engineering program kicking off a wave.  But this becomes very tricky and many very bright people have tried to find a way through this problem, Ray Ozzie being chief among them.  

We know the following:

1.    Collaborative technologies are on the verge of something momentous.

2.    We've been in this position for the past twenty years.

3.    Capitalistic economics is a stumbliung block on the path.

4.    When the solution arrives, it will not look like Usenet on acid.  

That is all for now.  If you want to wave at me, you can find me find me treading water @ briandjohnson at googlewave dot com

David Hockney's Favorite iPhone App as per t/ NYRB

I've noticed that most users of the Brushes application tend to trace out their brushstrokes with their pointer finger. (The screen measures changes in electrical charge, and can be operated only with a conductive object—like a finger—rather than a pen-like stylus.) As I discovered on a recent visit, Hockney limits his contact with the screen exclusively to the pad of his thumb. "The thing is," Hockney explains, "if you are using your pointer or other fingers, you actually have to be working from your elbow. Only the thumb has the opposable joint which allows you to move over the screen with maximum speed and agility, and the screen is exactly the right size, you can easily reach every corner with your thumb." He goes on to note how people used to worry that computers would one day render us "all thumbs," but it's incredible the dexterity, the expressive range, lodged in "these not-so-simple thumbs of ours."

Hockney, who has carried small notebooks in his pockets since his student days, along with pencils, crayons, pastel sticks, ink pens, and watercolor bottles—and smudged clean-up rags—is used to working small, but he delights in the simplicity of this new medium:

    It's always there in my pocket, there's no thrashing about, scrambling for the right color. One can set to work immediately, there's this wonderful impromptu quality, this freshness, to the activity; and when it's over, best of all, there's no mess, no clean-up. You just turn off the machine. Or, even better, you hit Send, and your little cohort of friends around the world gets to experience a similar immediacy. There's something, finally, very intimate about the whole process.

[more]

WSJ, 4.4.9: 'The Truman Show' for Everyone

Growing up in NYC at the dawn of the internet age, it was impossible not to pass through Josh Harris' shadow.  He was one of the first people I knew who figure out how to make big money on the internet:  talk abou it.  Except Josh did a lot more than just talk about it.  He put his entire mixed-jup life on it.  Given an infinite amount of money and bandwidth, Josh flamed out in a supernova and, thereby, establishing another pattern for others to follow.  As if further documentation was needed, Ondi Timoner spent the past decade putting the flotsom and jetsom of Josh's life into a movie, "We Live in Public." 

Josh lives in Ethiopia now.  Ondi's movie is receiving a lot of attention, including raves at Sundance. 

From the WSJ article: 

Why did you decide to release it [the movie] now?

OT: Around 2006, I saw the first status update from someone on Facebook. It said they were driving down the freeway, heading west, and I thought, "That is an unbelievable thing to put out there, why does anyone care?" Then I realized that people do care. The bunker that Josh created in 1999 when he commissioned these artists to create an artificial community in Manhattan was very much a metaphor for the Internet and social networking and everything we're seeing happening.

[more]

Why is this Woman Smiling?

Probably because she's not going to get her hands dirty reading the newspaper anymore.  Today, the publisher of the Rocky Mountain News will publish its last edition on Friday, February 27, 2009.  These cities are also set to lose one of their daily newspapers:

• San Francisco
• Philadelphia
• Minneapolis

and if you believe Marc Andreessen, the New York Times.

Here's a link to the story in the Wall Street Journal.

Marc Andreessen on Charlie Rose.

If you didn't know this already, Marc Andreessen is a very smart fellow.  Please, for your own benefit, watch this video to find out what's happening now and what's happening next. 

One more signal the Web 2.0 meme has jumped the shark...

If you've followed this screed for almost any length of time, you know that I frequently post articles from the McKinsey Quarterly.  This I do because McKinsey is Polaris in my sky, a star fixed in the heavens that can be used for navigating through the world of business ideas.  But based on this recent article, I'm thinking that this star might not be showing the way to true north.  Here's the evidence:

Six ways to make Web 2.0 work

Have you moved to the edge of your seat?  Then relax.  Here's the distilled list: 

1. The transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top.

2. The best uses come from users—but they require help to scale.

3. What’s in the workflow is what gets used.

4. Appeal to the participants’ egos and needs—not just their wallets.

5. The right solution comes from the right participants.

6. Balance the top-down and self-management of risk.

I thought number 4 was particularly good but had to make room for number 5. 

Here's a link to the story, and you really should take a look yourself so you can find out how Best Buy used Web 2.0 techniques to achieve it's ... success. 

It's all fun and games until your email address ends up on 4chan /b/

I don't think that we can possibly be reminded too frequently that the internet has some some venues that are beyond the pale of anything that could pass for civilization.  Take 4chan, for example. 

Don't know about 4chan?  Then consider yourself fortunately naive and, perhaps, even virginal by internet standards.  4chan is one of those places that your mother never told you to stay away from because your mother never imagined that places like 4chan exist in this world.  4chan has existed below the radar for a very long time, but now, 4chan has a face and a hit of fame on the Warhol scale.  Here is the true face of 4chan:

Meet Christopher Poole and look into the face of the man who's launch 1,000 memes, everything from LOLCats to RickRolling.  Here's his story.  And, as if that isn't enough, take a look at this profile in Tuesday's Washington Post.  This is the fellow sitting on top of 400,000 non-monetized posts per day.  He is a pioneer, an international criminal, a 21-year-old kid with the coolest reputation on the internet. 

So, read the stories and catch up. 

Hal Varian: Regarding the Economic Impact of the Web.

Hal Varian is one of the smartest people to ever think about the web.  He's also the author of one of the best books on the subject of the networked economy.  Varian is an economics professor at Berkely and, a couple of years ago, took the job of chief economist at Google. 

Recently, he was interviewed by McKinsey and the video is well worth your time.  Here's a snippet from the transcript: 

We have to look at today’s economy and say, “What is it that’s really scarce in the Internet economy?” And the answer is attention. [Psychologist] Herb Simon recognized this many years ago. He said, “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” So being able to capture someone’s attention at the right time is a very valuable asset. And Google really has built an entire business around this, because we’re capturing your attention when you’re doing a search for something you’re interested in. That’s the ideal time to show you an advertisement for a product that may be related or complimentary to what your search is all about.

Highly recommended.  Here's the link to the interview. 

Bruce Sterling: Pay Attention.

Bruce Sterling is one of the people I follow.  What I mean by that is this:  Whatever he has to say, whatever he's up to, whatever he's into, I need to know about it because Bruce Sterling has a time-tested knack for understanding what will happen next and is able to articulate this point of view in a fascinating manner.  I've been priviledged to hear him speak, in person and, at first, I was put off by the way he was reading his presentation but then I realized that no one could be that smart, that concise and that droll off-the-cuff or even working from an outline. 

And so, in what has become an annual gift to the world, Mr. Sterling has published his annual report on the state of the world.  His platform for the address is well.com, a venerable space on the internet.  Here's a sample from this year's musings:

I'm a bohemian type, so I could scarcely be bothered to do anything
"financially sound" in my entire adult life. Last year was the first
year when I've felt genuinely sorry for responsible, well-to-do people.
 Suddenly they've got the precariousness of creatives, of the
underclass, without that gleeful experience of decades spent
living-it-up.

These are people who obeyed the social contract and are *still*
getting it in the neck. The injustice of that upsets me. The
bourgeoisie who kept their noses clean and obeyed the rules, I never
had anything against them. I mean, of course I made big artsy fun of
them, one has to do that, but I never meant them any active harm. I
didn't scheme to raise a black flag and cut their throats because they
were consumers. 

I even fret about the bankers. Seventeen percent of the US works in
financial services. That's a lot. I've got friends and relatives who
work in those industries. I frankly enjoy tossing myself into
turbulent parts of life, because I'm a dilettante who bores easily, but
jeez, bankers are supposed to be the ultimate humorless brown-shoe
crowd. They're not supposed to wake up on a sleeping roll and scrounge
breakfast.

If the straights were not "prone to hostility" before that experience,
they might well be so after it, because they've got a new host of
excellent reasons. The sheer galling come-down of watching the Bottom
Line, the Almighty Dollar, revealed as a papier-mache pinata. It's
like somebody burned their church.

 I keep remembering the half-stunned, half-irritated looks on the
faces of those car execs when they were chided for flying their company
jets to Washington to beg. I felt sorrow for them. Truly. These
guys are the captains of American industry at the top of the food
chain. Of course they fly corporate jets. Corporate jets were
*invented* for guys like the board of General Motors. And now they're
getting skewered for that by a bunch of punk-ass Congressmen they can
usually buy and sell? 

*That's* the issue at stake, a few jets? General Motors built the
aviation industry in World War II. General Motors aircraft pounded
Nazi Germany into a flaming ruin. Here they get this off-the-wall,
total-hokum act of peanut-gallery gotcha humiliation about the
corporate airplanes they've used for fifty years. That must have felt
surreal, even nauseating.

There are going to be so many nettling, humiliating experiences for
similar people, people congenitally unable to laugh at themselves and
roll with the punches. Nowhere is safe any more, not even the
mirrorglass skyscraper, not even the boardroom. 

I wish I could make them feel safe, but since I've lived in parts of
the planet with no-kidding, real-deal economic collapse... I dunno,
does reading Dmitri Orlov feel safe? I love that guy's writing, I
really get it about him, but the prophets of doom have so little
comfort to offer people. Last thing I heard about Orlov the guy had
chucked it and was living on a small boat.

[more]

Judy Estrin on Innovation. You should read this.

By any measure, Judy Estrin is one of the Very Smart People from Silicon Valley.   In September, McGraw - Hill published her book, Closing the Innovation Gap.  In addition to descibing how Innovation takes place in a corporate setting (and how corporations can nurture it), she describes the growing innovation gap between the US and the rest of the world.     

Our short-sightedness has led to major challenges — dependence on oil, climate change, health care, and national security — that threaten our economy and quality of life. Each challenge also brings opportunities — if we give innovation the attention it deserves.

McKinsey recently had the good sense to interview Estrin and publish that video to its website.  You can find it here.

clays, aka Clay Shirky, Wise Man

About a million years ago in New York City, I signed up with that city's first ISP, Panix.  I was the 61st customer and I've sustained that relationship and honor it because Panix has been one of the few fixed points in the every changing sky of the internet. 

Obviously, there were only a handful of us and we helped each other out as much as we could.  When I first signed - on, all I saw on my screen with this:  $.  --Welcome to the internet. You have a UNIX shell account, some good tools pre-installed and ... that's all.  One of the very knd people back then who helped me figure things out was <clays>.  He evolved into one of the wisemen on Panix and could be trusted. 

Now, a million years later, Mr. Shirky has monetized all that good work and emerged as a pundit, one of the few that respect and admire without hesitation.  Mr. Shirky has travelled throughtout all the waters of the net and knows them better than most.  Furthermore, he has syntheized what he's learned into that precious element:  knowledge.

Recently the Columbia Journalism Review was smart enough to interview him. 

News is very complicated because the news, in fact, is not a very coherent category. We use the word “news” to describe more than one sort of rough set of things. We use “gossip” to describe another rough set of things. But, in fact, they overlap. And the news used to be defined with reference to news organizations. So, for example, you know, FDR’s polio was kept out of the news. Now, clearly, the information that FDR had polio would have been news had it come up. But because there were few enough news outlets, they could essentially conspire to make it not-news by simply not reporting it. As we know from the Drudge Report during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, those days are gone. And so the news is suffering the same kind of breakdown that I was talking about with behavioral economics and evolutionary psychology, which is the edge case of a group of accredited professionals deciding what becomes news and what doesn’t become news has now been set aside in favor of a much more soft-focus, kind of permeable membrane-oriented way of handling or thinking about the news.

<snip>

If there’s any lesson in all of this, it’s that you can breed an entire generation of really smart people to not think about existential threats to the business if you want to. We happen to be in an environment where, I think, it’s really damaged the print journalism world’s ability to think through the problems, because half the house hasn’t been invited into the conversation until just recently.

[more]

   

Where's George Gilder when you really need him?

About a million years ago, I was helping a Hewlett-Packard bring its line of consumer PCs to market, the Pavilion line.  I was a small part of a large team and we did some very good work.  I learned something very important from HP during that experience:  technology innovation usually appears first in consumer products and then ends up in enterprise products.  There are countless examples of this.

I saw two articles today that have nothing and everything to do with each other.  First, here's a story from the NY Times about internet usage at meetings and conventions:  

As recently as a few years ago, a type of connection called a T1 line was the norm for most hotels. With speeds of 1.5 megabits a second, it was robust enough for e-mail and Web browsing. (By comparison, an average at-home cable modem offers three to five megabits a second.)

The advent of cheap, user-friendly — but bandwidth-heavy — streaming video technology changed the status quo drastically. Demand at hotels and convention centers has spiked, as businesses add videoconferencing to their meetings and guests download media. Adding to the logjam, hotel managers are moving toward Web-based tools for managing back-of-the-house departments, using more bandwidth, too.

Most business hotels now have added more T1s or a T3 (also referred to as a DS3), which accommodates 28 T1s of traffic. Other hotels are installing fiber optics, which also offer large bandwidth capacity. Many of these new systems are what technology specialists term burstable, meaning they have a typical six or eight megabit-a-second rate of transmission but are capable of sustaining many times that amount of traffic if necessary.

Then, there's this article from the Wall Street Journal: 

Among the issues are what speed Congress should define as broadband and whether government money should be funneled only to areas that have no broadband access, or if it should also subsidize upgrades to existing networks.

Policies under serious consideration are corporate tax credits to build new wireless or landline infrastructure, government-backed broadband "bonds" and grants to companies or local governments, legislative aides and lobbyists close to the process say. There also is strong agreement that low-income consumers need to be encouraged to sign up for broadband -- for example, through vouchers to purchase computers or discounts on monthly service.

Folks, this is an issue  we've been discussing since the fourth issue of Wired magazine, September 1993.  The United States will have a bandwidth crises Real Soon Now.  It was this year that notebook computer sales surpassed desktops.  What percentage of those notebooks have wireless connnections built in?  And how many cellphones have WiFi connections built into them?  And Cisco is making stereo equipment now?  (I'll leave it to you to size that a mistake that is, but please consult some of 3Com's former employees before placing your bet in the deadpool.)

What amazes me is that, in all the time, no one found a business model that would light up the hundreds of miles of dark fiber that weaves across the country and make a buck at the same time.  As of this writing, my employer pays $40 / month for me to have broadband into my home so I can work for them 24 x 7. (Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.)  That's a ton of money when you start to think that I'm not the only one doing this.   And then there are all those people who pay for it out of their own pocket.  And how many people in the new economy will be working out of Peet's, slurping up their broadband and lattes?  Here's one to think about:  What's going to happen when we actually receive our Skype handset? 

A tsunami of bandwidth hungry people are about to crash onto our shore.  Someone has got to figure out how to monetize them without resorting to goverment subsidies.  If I can't understand bailing out GM, I'm way not ready to subsidize Qwest.  No hard feelings, okay?  I'm just saying.

Mary Meeker's Annual Séance

Honestly, I've lost track of how many years Mary Meeker has stepped down from the mountain top to deliver to us mere mortals her view of the digital economy and her prediction for where it's headed next.  This year, Ms. Meeker used the Web 2.0 conference as a platform for her prognostications.  Here are a couple of points from her summary:

• It's hard to tell how long the recession will last. 
• Technology and advertising spending is closely tied to GDP growth.

and my favorite..

• Companies with cogent business models that provide consumers with value should survive / thrive. 

Now that we've got that straight, don't you feel smarter? 

For the complete presentation with whizzy charts, please go here. 

Regarding the 2.1 Firmware Upgrade from Apple....

My dear friend who knows Far More about consumer electronics than I do wrote to me about his experience updating his iPod Touch with the 2.1 firmware.  This is what he had to say:

• Has the new iTunes 'Genius Playlist' feature ON the touch
  
• Performance seems a bit faster overall
• Backs up with iTunes MUCH faster
  
• Gets POP mail (Comcast, Yahoo, etc) MUCH faster and reads some Yahoo Groups mail that comes to my Comcast account MUCH better than before (sometimes used to show mail but not download the content)
  
• The LOCATION circle of where I am seems to be smaller and better positioned. I THINK they've improved the wi-fi accuracy quite a bit
  

I hope the iPhone fixes are as good as the touch ones appear to be!"

My own experience with the upgrade was very satisfactory.  My heart is always in my throat whenever I do a firmware upgrade of any kind due to my history of bricking gadgets of every stripe during similar operations.  (Nothing resembles a brick more than a bricked Newton.)  Anyhoo, after I worked through the usual panic attack, my iPhone surfaced quite nicely and, I guess, is running better.  Honestly, I don't notice much difference. 

I haven't written to you about my iPhone so I'll share these thoughts with you now:

1.  The UI is like ... something very sweet and delicious and probably bad for you.  Apple is without a peer when it comes to UI and the iPhone is spectacular.

2.  The apps ... while I liked the free market economy of Palm apps, I deeply respect how Apple is bringing the apps to users.  If I were a developer, I would be Very Grateful that Apple went out of its way to build this infrastructure. 

3.  Battery.  I've read various dings on the battery life, but my experience is this:  Because I use the phone so much more than an "ordinary" cell phone, the battery takes a bit of a hit.  What's really being described as dings on battery life are symptoms of how bloody useful the iPhone is.  I've installed fifty-one apps to my iPhone and I really do use most of them at least once a day.  eReader is a Very Strong eBook application.  Facebook is a great interface and I would argue better than the one on my screen.  I have my iPhone activesyncing with my company's Exchange server and gMail is onboard through IMAP.  (Please don't use POP for gMail because you deserve better than that and IMAP is just as easy to set up.)    This is my first location-based appliance and it has already saved my biscuits from burning on more than one occassion.  --So, yeah, I'm using it A Lot more than my previous cell phone.  Battery hit?  No surprise. 

4.  More about the apps.  I really appreciate the fact that Apple has extended itself to content people so that they can present their web-based apps so conveniently on the iPhone.  Remember The Milk is swell on the iPhone.  LinkedIn really works great on the iPhone and I'm sure both of these "applications" for the iPhone (really just a different html frontend) was easy to develop.  Good work here.   

5.  And I want more.  I'm impatient when I find something that hasn't be customized for my iPhone.  I want someone to write a frontend to LiveJournal Righ Now so I can more easily keep up with my friends there.   I want Wells Fargo to make it just a little bit easier for me to bank over my iPhone (as long as there isn't a trade off with security).  And I'd like some more device-to-device appls like I had on my Palm that lets me share things more easily with other iPhones.  (But suspect that DRM worries prevent this.)  And I want a ton of peer-to-peer Wi-Fi enabled location-based apps that I can't even imagine right now but fully anticipate some Smart Young Thing is already hard at work on.   

I took my time moving from the Treo to the iPhone and I'm glad I waited for the 3G to arrive before I got in line.  And I'm very glad I didn't wait  any longer.  Very Pleased. 

Ambient Awareness: Get It.

The New York Times holds a special spot on the menu of my media diet.  It occupies the type of media that I read because it is what it is.  It has a topology that turns inward on itself but nevertheless reaches out and illuminates Other Things.  I enjoy reading the NY Times, and I'm also obliged to read the NYTimes as it is essential to whatever it is that I do.  But I never really turn the pages expecting to be Profoundly Enlightened about the new worlds of technology / society where I go spelunking.   This past Sunday, September 7, was different. 

Mr. Clive Thompson has discovered another country and showed us part of a map.  It isn't so much that he discovered that more of us are keeping up with more of us in novel ways.  Thousands of people on LiveJournal knew this ages ago.  Rather, Mr. Thompson gives us a latitude and longitude, the coordinates of the place.  Many years back, William Gibson defined virtual reality as where one is when one is speaking to someone else on the telephone and this is surely the truth.  Mr. Thompson gives us ambient awareness, the particular knowing we have of individuals, near and far, we arrive at through the glimpses we receive through Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc.  --Thank you. 

I strongly suggest you read the article.  It starts off a bit slow, but ride it out. 

Oversharing.

Charmed.

My instruments alerted me to a story that will appear in this coming Sunday's New York Times Magazine entitled Exposed.  (I can remember how, when I worked in the halls of book publisher, we would receive parts of the Sunday paper mid-week, all fresh smelling and glistening with the dew that the cognoscente would discuss over afternoon cocktails in cool, dark lounges.)

Bethatasitmay, I received the alert that the New York Sunday Times magazine will feature a story by one Ms. Emily Gould.  Ms Gould's reputation precedes her and then there was this rather ... humid ... photo illustration.

So I arrived at the article prepared to cringe at yet another amazed and naive account of Life On The Internet Thing As Understood  By The New York Times, that would set back the Our Cause by another year. (Internet?  Hmpf.  People with tattoos and STDs chattering about absolutely any random thing that occurs to them. Hmpf.  You can't be serious.)  I heard myself saying, "I've invested twenty years into this internet thing and we're right back to Big Brother and MySpace and internet = wasteland.  Damn. 

But then I read the article and was absolutely charmed.  This is the first time that I can remember that The New York Times has run a story where the internet is a part of the story but not the novelty of the story or the morale of the story or the glittering brand-new toy of the story.  Here are some parts I liked: 

Emily writes ...

When, at age 24, she decided to move to New York, she had two career options: Columbia Journalism School or Gawker. She chose Gawker. Two years later, every magazine editor in town knew her name, and she was hired as the online editor of Vanity Fair. Maybe the days were over when young comers were slowly mentored as they prepared to assume their bosses’ titles, covering community-board meetings or fetching coffee.

Indeed.  Don't forget the cream and extra sugar.  Emily does an excellent job of capturing the climate and choices of New York media, the juxtaposition of cardboard coffee cups and sitting next to Anna Wintour. 

Then, Emily describes what it's like to be an online celebrity.  For me the sub head captures it whole:  "Famous for 15 People."  This is something I've observed with great interest during the past couple of decades:  How celebrity manifests itself in the online world.  There, we can find almost affinity groups circling around almost anything or anybody.  I have watched, in rapt fascination, the rise and fall of many people on Live Journal, and antecedents like the Well and elsewhere who are famous because... and that's the most fascinating part of all.

They are famous because they are maestros of the medium and it is this specific talent that propels them.

I can cite two very different examples and experiences.  On Live Journal, I am a "friend" of someone  who I've never met in real life.  I read her journal , listen to her telephone posts, and follow her through her life step-by-step because she pretty much chronicles her life in that much detail. 

So, at first, I'm self-conscious about this as it made me feel like some sort of voyeur.  Afterall, what is my real connection with this person?  And then I noticed that she made me think about things in a new way and that I would take things from her and use them in my own life.  And feel good  about it.  I am informed, entertained and educated.  So what is this experience?

I had a very different experience involving someone who wasn't there.  Again, on Live Journal, I began to observe someone who was presented with Great Challenges in her life.  Her story unspooled over more than a year.  There were spiritual, mental and physical setbacks that culminated in what appeared to be an attempted suicide.  And I had a moment, like that we might have experienced in reading fiction, when one becomes aware that there is a story-teller telling a story about the story-teller.  Such like:  And then the whale rammed our ship and we all died.  I realized that I had become enmeshed in a work of fiction that, in technique, was no different from Bram Stoker's famous work. 

Jonathan Harker's Journal

3 May. Bistritz. __Left Munich at 8:35 P.  M, on 1st  May, arriving at Vienna early next morning;  should  have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place,  from the glimpse which I got of it  from  the train and the little I could walk  through  the streets.   I feared to go very far from the station,  as we  had  arrived late and would start as near the correct time  as  possible.

We will read this text and become involved in it and then at some point we might become self-conscious of the fact that the author of this diary ... wait, it isn't really a diary, it's a work of fiction akin to the epistolatory novels of, say, Samual Richardson (see Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady a memoir [of course Don Quixote and, my personal favorite, Tristram Shandy (Norton Critical Editions)].  (And do consider the Norton as these editions uniformly have the best notes, essays, illustrations and annotations.) 

Basically, what I'm reaching for here is that Ms. Gould tarries exactly on the cusp of our life / our fiction and the porosity of the  boundary between them.  And she accurately captures the results of actually becoming the protagonist of your own life. 

Kudos, Ms. Gould, and thanks for oversharing.

 

I Want You to Want Me

This is very, very interesting and gives me hope about what we can do with this internet.

It's quaint....

In today's NYTimes, I noticed the cover story of the business section on the saga of Jimmy Wales.  The jump landed me at a picture of Rachel Marsden selling one of Mr. Wales' t-shirts.  Then, on the next page was a story about Rush Limbaugh's Mac support issues and how he used his radio program to get his computers fixed. 

And I thought, how quaint.  These are two stories that have been kicking around the internet for a couple of weeks.  And that made me think about why the NYTimes decided to run these stories now or, at all.  It isn't as if either of the stories in the NYTimes added anything to the reporting that has already been done elsewhere.  --I could have written the stories (re-writing what's already on the 'net.)  So, what's the point?  I hope the NYTimes doesn't decide it's OK just to rehash what's on ValleyWag. 

Of course, I scarcely care about Jimmy Wales love life and really, really don't care at all about what type of computer Rush Limbaugh uses much less how he bullies the manufacturer into a level of support no one else receives. 

I just hope that this particular Monday was a bit slow and the editors were grabbing whatever copy they could find. 

My Music, My Radio, My Roku.

Hi.  Along the way from there to here, I've become quite enamored of some radio stations.  So has beloved spouse Abby.  We are radio people.  Our union was blessed by the radio and we've chronicled the different chapters of our lives using the radio stations we were listening to at the time. 

KISR
KMOX
KBAI
KOPN
WBGO
WMBR
WHRB
WNYC
WBGO
WBAI
WSHU
KXJZ
KCSM
KXJZ
KFJC
KQED

These call letters trace a route from the middle to the East to the West, the route I've taken from there to here. 

The internet has un-moored radio, as it has so many other things that were once time / space dependent.  Beloved Abby and I miss many of our old friends, but through the magic of internet, we've been reunited.  We've tried many different ways to listen to internet radio but we are Very Impressed with our recently acquired Roku, so impressed we're buying two more. 

Roku is exactly what it says it is, a SoundBridge between the computer and the way we listen to our music.  When my computerized music server is on, Roku seamlessly connects to my library of digitized tunes.  And when the computer is off, it will still connect us to our favorite radio stations. 

Drop dead simple to install.  Never opened the documentation.  Very well designed.  Performs beyond my expectations.  Highly recommended. 

Goldman Sachs is Not a Corporate Sponsor of the EFF

Today, Google's blog posted an entry from David Drummond, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer.  In the post, Mr. Drummond contends that Microsoft probably shouldn't be allowed to buy Yahoo as this would give them too much power over the internet. 

This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It's about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.

Okay, so I believe this is probably true, but it probably shouldn't be the first go-to argument.  Last time I checked Goldman Sachs or for that matter any other investment bank is not a corporate sponsor of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation.  (I am and encourage you to join too.) 

Any argument beyond, "It's a bad business idea," is a bit too sentimental for the business world to care about.  I think the following are probably better arguments to put forward:

1.  Yahoo is injured and it could be fatal.  It hasn't delivered an innovation in a few years and many of its leading applications (mail, photography) have been acquisitions, not inventions.  I'm not sure that they have any innovations in it any more.

2.  Yahoo's installed base of "users" can, at any moment, run for the doors.  Nothing locks them in and they might well flee under new management. 

3.  The bid is far too high.  Yahoo is probably over valued right now and investors are catching on. 

4.  Yahoo's search engine?  I don't think so.  Can anyone make an argument that it stands a chance against Google?  To tell you the truth, my back-up search engine of choice is A2, not that I get to it much after trying Google. 

My view is that Google is best served to stay the heck out of the public spotlight on this one and work private channels instead.  By speaking up, particularly when it uses arguments about the public good, might make Google appeared to be frightened about the prospect of Microsoft acquiring Yahoo.  If it were me, and I had to put out a soundbyte, I might go with something along the lines of, "Well, to tell you the truth, we're pleased about Microsoft taking on Yahoo.  This way, Yahoo will be out of the competitive picture and Microsoft will be too busy trying to digest the acquisition to be an effective competitor for at least five years." 

Two Notes About Amazon

First, Amazon reports this in their most recent financial statement:

Adoption of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) continues to grow. As an indicator of adoption, bandwidth utilized by these services in fourth quarter 2007 was even greater than bandwidth utilized in the same period by all of Amazon.com’s global websites combined.

Wow.  You've got to believe that's a lot of bandwidth whatever it works out to be.

Then, comes the news today that Amazon has acquired Audible.  While Audible hasn't rocked my world for a while, it is deeply connected to iTunes.  I'm quite happy that whatever assets Audible has left will now be tended to by Amazon because I think Amazon will actually do something with the property / brand / content. 

Of course we can throw Kindle on the pile and notice that Amazon is still an important center of gravity / ideas / power.  While I haven't yet bought a Kindle, I'm watching it very close as I think it's the first device that meets most of our requirements for an electronic book. 

I've "permissioned" my Tivo to my Amazon account and am looking forward to buying video content from the company and I'm very impressed impressed with Amazonmp3. 

Perhaps the most interesting angle on all of this is Amazon's position on digital rights mangement.  Unlike some companies we all know all too well, Amazon has been very cool about drm.  The music we download from Amazon has no drm.  I haven't devled into the video that I can buy from them but my guess is that it doesn't have drm (eventhough Tivo is a bit uptight about drm).

Very interesting, Amazon.  Please continue to impress me. 

The State of the Goat.

I've been posting to LiveJournal for Very Long Time.  One of t he charming things about LiveJournal is its mascot, the goat.  Annually, LiveJournal publishes, the State of the Goat.  Last year was eventful for LiveJournal.  Six Apart sold it to a Russian company and there was a huge kerfuffle regarding the censorship of some journals.  This is how that contretemps was descirbed in this year's State of the Goat:

In our attempt to implement a zero tolerance policy towards content that
supports child abuse, pedophilia, or sexual violence, we suspended about
500 journals in May of 2007 that should not have been taken down. We wish
it hadn't happened at all, and we cannot say we're sorry enough. However,
we did immediately realize our mistake, and all of the journals that did
not break our TOS were restored as quickly as possible. We really screwed
up, and when that happens, we've learned the best thing to do is just admit
it and try to fix the problem to the best of our abilities.

While I didn't appreciate the kerfuffle as it sent a very large community into paroxysms and floods of ill will, I do very much appreciate the directness and simplicity the incident was described in the State of the Goat.  And this is probably a good lesson for others to notice and learn from.

Do you have one of those friends...

... who knows way more than you do about a topic you're interested in and you decide not to study the topic anymore because you can just ask your friend what to do?

When I was a much younger man, I thought I would study wine and it might make for a good hobby.  Then, I met my future father-in-law and realized I didn't have to know anything about wine.  I could just ask him and draft behind him as it bought -- and sampled -- very good wines.  Indeed. 

I have a good friend who knows way more about home / entertainment, audio, video than I do and if I ever have a question or I'm facing a buying decision, I just ask him and do whatever he says.  So, I rather fancied the iPod Touch (iPhone minus the phone) and he had just bought one and was taking it with him on his annual diving holiday in the Caribbean and when he came back, I asked him what he thought. 

This is what I learned:

• The Touch ROCKS, is PHAT, is Bitchin', is too cool for school! --- All that old stuff.
  
  
• The Safari browser is GREAT! I browsed at home through my Linksys router and at work. Wifi setup is easy and straightforward.
  
  
• I've also found a nice selection of interesting mobile web sites, many formatted for the iPhone/Touch to bookmark. The wi-fi automatically connects me to the last successful connection for any place I am. So, if I'm at home it connects to my WAP. When it work it connects to my work net.  All without me doing a thing. Seamless. 
  
  
• The Google iPhone / Touch formatted calendar app and Gmail work VERY nicely when on-line
  
  
• The photos I uploaded look GREAT (they adjusted nicely) on the wide screen and 'fingering' through them is a joy!
  
  
• I used TivoToGo to upload the Revenge of the Pink Panther and watched a few minutes. I can see where I'd use this more than on my G5 screen. NICE screen, and a thoughtful little plastic stand is useful to watch shows just sitting it on my desk! I also ripped two DVD for viewing on the plane when I was traveling to Little Cayman for vacation. Niiiiiicccceeee!
  
  
• The sound: I'm running it on my cheap little USB Vase speaker here in the office and sounds fine. My Eytomotic earbuds sound as good as my G5.

The latest storage metrics:

• 1,423 Songs - Haven't counted the albums
  
  
• 4 Movies (about 2:00 each, averaged) - Two from Tivo, via Tivo2Go, and two 'ripped' from DVDs that I haven't watched yet.. (yea, behind on movie watching)
  
  
• 16 pictures (only my latest favs)
  
  
• 4 Podcasts - Dylan's No Direction Home - parts 1-4
  
  
• Syn'd my Outlook contacts - A couple hundred probably
  
  
• Still have 3.6GB left

The NOT SO GOOD:

• No FLASH support
  
  
• No music streaming, SO FAR. -- Hope springs eternal

By the way, my friend also know a lot about wine.

McKinsey Quarterly: Eight Business Technology Trends to Watch

I don't turn to McKinsey for bleeding edge insight.  Rather, I use the consultancy as a pulsepoint on Mainstream American Business Thinking.  I have tremendous respect for the firm and what it has accomplished, especially as it pertains to the sheen of its reputation.   

Anyway, I'm a devotee of lists, always have been, always will be.  (I'm still pondering last week's NYTimes' list of Ideas.)   So,  the  McKinsey Quarterly has published an article entitled, Eight Business Technology Trends to Watch.  Do tell.  Spill.

I'll distill it for you here but I highly recommend that you spend the time with the article and read it through as it is much more nuanced than a mere list of eight sub-heads.  (By the way, does anyone else find it odd that McKinsey came up with eight?  I actually think that the number eight makes the list more credible.  Anyone can say, "Here's the top ten..."  Leave it to McKinsey to divine that there are precisely eight business technology trends to watch.)

1.    Distributing cocreation
2.    Using consumers as innovators
3.    Taping into a world of talent
4.    Extracting more value from interactions
5.    Expanding the frontiers of automation
6.    Unbundling production from delivery
7.    Putting more science into management
8.    Making business from information

There.  As I wrote above, not exactly bleeding edge thinking here, but some of these are very interesting to think about. 

The first trend, distributing cocreation, cites Linux, whereas I would be more inclined to say that the value of LiveJournal or Second Life is vested in the activity of the subscribers. 

The second trend, using consumers as innovators, has been around so long there's moss growing on it. When I helped HP introduce its line of consumer personal computers way back when, this was noted. 

The third trend, taping into a world of talent, well, lets just notice that I'm frequently the only person from North American in some meetings I attend.  I think this is one of the more "duh" trends on the list.

The fourth trend, extracting more value from interactions, fascinates me.  Theoretically, there's a database where we can mine composite information on the sales of ... everything.  With the assistance of collaborative filtering we could easily instantiate Jung's Oversoul.  So much of our identity is wrapped around what we buy and all of this is captured all the time. 

The fifth trend, expanding the frontiers of automation, well, I'll raise a glass to that.  The information age has brought with it an underclass of repair people, schleppers, keyboardists, etc. who should find better ways to spend their time.

The sixth trend, unbundling production from delivery, cites Amazon.  Completely agree.  Can be applied anywhere, say, personal computing.  Take Dell's model and push it down one more level so I can spec out exactly how many USB and Firewire ports are in the front and the back of the machine.  Dell could extend here. 

The seventh trend, putting more science into management, well, ... yes, please.  Especially if it would prevent some of the rather distressing ups and downs we go through. 

The eighth trend, making business from information, ... I have far too many thoughts on this right now to do justice to it.  I've spent my entire life riding this particular "trend."  I also think this trend marries up rather nicely with some of the aforementioned. 

Information.  Information.  I LOVE thinking about information. 

Here's the article.  Now go read it already.

Fascinating Article @ Wharton Review

Read this quote from Wharton marketing professor Z. John Zhang:

With the Internet, you have unlimited potential for privacy: No one knows you're a dog.  On the other hand, a company can accumulate so much information about you, including how much time you spend on a website and [what sites] you visit. If [a company] pulls that information together with other data, [the user] loses privacy. If companies target too much, the entire online environment will change. It becomes big brother-ish.

I highly recommend the article.

This afternoon I was chatting with a good friend and recommended that he sign up now for Grand Central, one of Google's acquisitions and, I must say, a durn good service, especially when compared to paid services that I still use (but will transition from). 

And then it hit me once again.  Google has all my mail.  They will have all my contacts.  They will have a record of when those contacts call me (and sometimes when I call them).  They still don't have my photographs but they do have my video.  They have my credit card number, They're starting to get more and more of my documents and spreadsheets.  They know when I do things.  They know when I blog (and... ahem ... who reads my blog).  [By the way, that is a lillypad in the url.]  They don't host my website but they do know the analytics. They know what I search for and my bookmarks.  They can see me chat sometimes. 

So... 

I remember on June first of this year, when Google acquired Feedburner, that I started to get a little creeped out by how exposed I was then to Google and since then, I've probably increased my exposure exponentially. 

Then, today, I receive Business Week with it's ridiculous cover photo.  And I'm saying to myself (after I get beyond the quick comment of gratitude that I couldn't actually see anything when I looked up Christophe Bisciglia's nose [including his brains for letting himself get posed like that {PR?!  PR?!?!?  Hello?!?!?!?! Did it not even occur to you...?}]), "Microsoft is irrelevant compared to Google."  Remember when we (age check please) were all creeped out about Microsoft?  That's nothing, trivial compared to me being able to check from my computer screen how many cars there are in my driveway when the Keyhole satellite passed over and etc. 

Brilliant Article from McKinsey...

Crafting a Message that sticks...

This is an interview with Chip Heath, the author of

Download McK--Comm.pdf

One gets the feeling that reading the article might be a good substitute for the book.