Context & Continuity

NYTimes, 7.18.10: The Russian Immigrant’s Handbook

The New York Times continues its information, ad hoc serious on the dangers of the new information / internet age with an interview w/ Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story.  Observe: 

I don’t know how to read anymore. I can only read 20 or 30 words at a time before taking out my iPhone and caressing it and snuggling with it.

...Silence has been destroyed, but also the idea that it’s important to learn how another person thinks, to enter the mind of another person. The whole idea of empathy is gone. We are now part of this giant machine where every second we have to take out a device and contribute our thoughts and opinions.  [more]

NYTimes, 7.16.10: Tweet Less, Kiss More

Highly recommended. 

Mr. Herbert uses his bully pulpit as NYTimes columnist to join the barricades to protect civilization against information technology, aka the internet.  Note this:

There’s a character in the August Wilson play “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” who says everyone has a song inside of him or her, and that you lose sight of that song at your peril. If you get out of touch with your song, forget how to sing it, you’re bound to end up frustrated and dissatisfied.

As this character says, recalling a time when he was out of touch with his own song, “Something wasn’t making my heart smooth and easy.”

I don’t think we can stay in touch with our song by constantly Twittering or tweeting, or thumbing out messages on our BlackBerrys, or piling up virtual friends on Facebook.

We need to reduce the speed limits of our lives. We need to savor the trip. Leave the cellphone at home every once in awhile. Try kissing more and tweeting less. And stop talking so much.

Listen.

Other people have something to say, too. And when they don’t, that glorious silence that you hear will have more to say to you than you ever imagined. That is when you will begin to hear your song. That’s when your best thoughts take hold, and you become really you.   [more]

Juan and Alice say... Happy Birthday, Esther Dyson!

If one is very, very blessed, there will appear two or three teachers who will completely change our view of the world and point us towards undiscovered continents of understanding and wisdom.  So, I've been especially blessed.

Esther Dyson, through her writings and conferences, taught me more about information technology that I could have imagined.  But more than just that, she taught me how to think.  And even more than that, Ms. Dyson taught me how to think about thinking. 

On this day in 1951, Ms. Dyson was born in Zurich and this small corner of the world has never been the same.  So I will join my voice with Juan and Alice and wish Ms. Dyson a very happy birthday and wish her many, many more. 

Thanks for everything. 

Clay Shirkey: Why Facebook has Surplanted Minesweeper as Time Waster.

I've written about the great work Clay Shirkey has been doing regaring online and social media. Perhaps you haven't had a chance to read his new book, Cognitive Surplus. If that's the case, and you'd like an appetizer before the entree, I'm sharing with you a few minutes of Mr. Shirkey's brilliance as relayed to us by Big Think.  Please make the time to watch and learn. 

Facebook Creates Own International Currency.

How big is Facebook?  Are you sure you want to know?  Really?  Then ask yourself a question:  Does the company you work for have its own currenny, i.e. its own money accepted around the world? 

Let's say you work for one of the large companies in Silicon Valley:  Cisco.  Does Cisco have its own currency?  No.  Or another company here in the Bay Area, Safeway.  Safeway comes close because it has its own prepaid cards, and that's what Facebook is creating with the help of a company in Malaysia.  (Malaysia?  Great company, but why go so far to create Facebook Credits?  Oh, of course.  It's off shore.) 

Here's the quick reporting from Business Week / Bloomberg:

Facebook users may buy credits to use in games such as Farmville, developed by San Francisco, California-based Zynga Game Network Inc., which attracts more than 62 million players monthly, according to Facebook’s website.

MOLPoints will be available in cybercafés, 7-Eleven Inc. convenience stores and online banks...

Some of us, well that would be me, aren't quite sure we (I) understand the notion of life in this new fangled virtual world.  If that's the case for you, perhaps you'll want to follow my lead and spend some time digesting the new issue of First Monday, an online publication you really ought to learn more about and appreciate.  In the current edition, one finds the following stories:

Seller Activity in the Virtual Marketplace

My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft

And this very interesting article,

Pirates of Silicon Valley: State of exception and dispossession in Web 2.0

Which includes this gem

Our conclusion is then that the definitions of and attitudes towards legitimate piracy is very much in the air right now.

Indeed.

Overall, please visit First Monday.

Jakob Nielsen, t/ Smartest Guy in the Room, on eBook Usability.

Jakob Nielsen.  You're already familiar with him and his work because you've been paying attention to web design issues during the past ten years.  He's carved our a well-deserved reputation for knowing more about web design than anyone else.  Period.  

So, I was Very Excited when I discovered Mr. Nielsen turned his high beams onto the subject of eBooks because, as you know, dear reader, eBooks make my short list of interests / obsessions. 

Here's a link to Nielsen's report, and, below are some of the salient points:

(Love this...)  On each device, we asked each user to read a short story by Ernest Hemingway. We picked Hemingway because his work is pleasant and engaging to read, and yet not so complicated that it would be above the heads of users.  (Yes, that would be Hemingway, not too complicated.)  

The iPad measured at 6.2% lower reading speed than the printed book, whereas the Kindle measured at 10.7% slower than print. However, the difference between the two devices was not statistically significant because of the data's fairly high variability.  (Hooray for books!)

Most of the users' free-form comments were predictable. For example, they disliked that the iPad was so heavy and that the Kindle featured less-crisp gray-on-gray letters. People also disliked the lack of true pagination and preferred the way the iPad (actually, the iBook app) indicated the amount of text left in a chapter.

I didn't seen anything metric on trying to read in sunshine, which is where the Kindle is supposed to shine over the iPad, but it might appear in the full report on in the next report.

Godspeed, Mr. Nielsen.  Godspeed. 

Are We Worried Yet? CyberWar.

I've written before about Cyber Security, Internet Security, what-you-will and have been professional interesting in the issue for a long, long time.  Eventhough I'm an English Major, I've been able to teach myself enough about how the internet works to believe "internet security" is a non sequitur.  Or, as Mr. Scott McNealy once said, "It doesn't exist."  We can always depend on Mr. McNealy to put things plain. 

Now, some years after the popularization of the internet, we find all types and manners of things attached to it, including some important parts of our national infrastructure such as the national electric grid and assorted nuclear power plants, air traffic control systems and, oh, just let your imagination run wild.  

There's been a spate of recent articles and news about this issue.  Most recently, today, the Wall Street Journal reports that Raytheon has won an enormous contract to help protect the United States of America from a cyber attack.

The surveillance by the National Security Agency, the government's chief eavesdropping agency, would rely on a set of sensors deployed in computer networks for critical infrastructure that would be triggered by unusual activity suggesting an impending cyber attack, though it wouldn't persistently monitor the whole system, these people said.

Defense contractor Raytheon Corp. recently won a classified contract for the initial phase of the surveillance effort valued at up to $100 million, said a person familiar with the project.

and...

The NSA years ago began a small-scale effort to address this problem code-named April Strawberry, the military official said. The program researched vulnerabilities in computer networks running critical infrastructure and sought ways to close security holes.

April Strawberry?  This is only one of the many reasons I'm not employed by the U.S. intelligence community.  

In addition to the Wall Street Journal story, I can recommend the following:

The Economist, CyberWar

Intelligence Squared:  The Cyber War Threat Has Been Grossly Exaggerated.  This program is especially good as it features Jonathan Zitrain, Marc Rotenberg, Bruce Schneier and Mike McConnell and these are people who know what they're talking about. 

Facebook: We Have Found the Enemy...

... or, at least, a media whirlwind. 

David Kirkpatrick's book, The Facebook Effect, has been making the rounds of the news interview shows, including today's Morning Show on KPFA.  The nice thing about Mr. Kirkpatrick's appearance on this Pacifica affiliate is that Mr. Kirkpatrick let's his hair down, so to speak, about Facebook's threat to personal privacy.  If you're interested in media coverage of Mr. Kirkpatrick's book, or interested, in general, in Facebook, I highly recommend listening to the program. 

My favorite part of the interview comes when Mr. Kirkpatrick explains how Facebook management believes online privacy is a fiction.  Mr. Kirkpatrick describes how Facebook takes two steps toward reducing privacy, faces user outrage, takes one step back and then, a few months later takes that other step forward again.  And, just to ensure users share the blame with Facebook, these features, such as the News Feed, becomes an essential element of the service.  --Quite true. 

Any erosion of privacy we experience on Facebook is a cooperative effort as we users continue to pile terabytes of content onto the service every hour.  To quote Walt Kelly, "We have found the enemy, and he is us."

KPFA Morning Show Thursday July 8,2010 - July 8, 2010 at 7:00am

Click to listen (or download)

The Man Who Invented t/ Future.

Because I grew up in a remote part of the U.S. founded next to a river populated with lots of skilled labor, Fort Smith, Arkansas was center for printing and, at one time, printed tickets for most of the sporting and other entertainment events in the country.  The company; Weldon, Williams and Lick; still says it's still the leader in printing tickets for events. 

So, the high school I attended was fitted out with a printing plant.  There were two Linotype machines and a large platen press.  This meant that those of us who worked for the school newspaper labored cheek and jowl with our friends in the print shop and this was a great education on rigorous newspaper layout and design.  When one is working with slugs of lead type locked up in a chase, precision is paramount. 

Bethatasitmay, all of the above is a simple preamble to the point, Louis Moyroud, one of the two people responsible for inventing what we came to call "cold type" has passed away at the age of 96.  Here's an extract from the obituary in today's NYTimes:

In the 1880s, Ottmar Mergenthaler invented the Linotype machine. Its operator sat at a keyboard that looked something like a typewriter, creating lines of type that were formed from lead bubbling in a melting pot at more than 500 degrees. Columns of type, called galleys, would be loaded into a heavy metal frame, called a chase. The chase was then pressed against a thick paper mold, from which a curved metal printing plate was cast and, finally, placed on the press.

It was a cumbersome and costly process.

Then, in the early 1940s, Mr. Moyroud and Mr. Higonnet — electronics engineers and colleagues at a subsidiary of ITT (formerly International Telephone & Telegraph) in Lyon, France — visited a nearby printing plant and witnessed the Linotype operation.

“My dad always said they thought it was insane,” Patrick Moyroud (pronounced MOY-rood) said. “They saw the possibility of making the process electronic, replacing the metal with photography. So they started cobbling together typewriters, electronic relays, a photographic disc.”

The result, called a photo-composing machine — and in later variations the Lumitype and the Photon — used a strobe light and a series of lenses to project characters from a spinning disc onto photographic paper, which was pasted onto pages, then photoengraved on plates for printing.  [more]

Online Identity: Work in Progress, Threat to Privacy, Essential for Progess

Color me conflicted.

Tom Stoppard once said he enjoyed writing plays because he could both sides of an argument.  I can see that, especially as it applies to online anonymity / identity.

I want anonymity, not because I'm afraid to be caught surfing my friends' posts on LiveJournal, but because I really don't want my interests to be instantly commercialized.  Honestly, when I read my mail through a browser instead of Thunderbird, I am not amused by the odd advertisements Google decides to push my way.  (Tired of ads when you're sending / receiving email?  Then consider joining an interesting conspiracy.  Somepeople are including words such as suicide, death, caskets and other Edward Gorey-esqe notions in one-point type in their signatures.  Apparently, when Google parses these messages, the company elects not to push ads.  --Wise choice.  Easy, if morbid, hack.)

But I digress. 

There are perfectly good and honorable and courageous reasons to be anonymous online.  Consider those politically active folks in China, I mean the ones who are working to reform the current government.  I think it's a really good idea that they're anonymous. 

Then, I can see some great reasons why identity is so important.  I've worked on behalf of people who want to sell stuff online and this activity is rather tricky.  Really good identity would make this a safer and more satisfying.  Furthermore, I want to know that the person who sent me a message is really the person who claims to have sent me the message.  --Rather fundamental, eh?  Right now, it's a matter of trust.  Have you ever received a text message from your husband only to find out it's from one of your kids?  Better still, have you ever received a call from your wife only to find out that it's your kid using your wife's cellphone?  This can be rather embarrassing if one spies the caller id and decides to speak words of love and affection as a greeting. 

Esther Dyson studied this issue Long and Hard back in the day and I highly recommend wandering through her stacks of past issues.  Her newsletters are a post-graduate course on everything most important in technology.  Most recently, the Famous Ms. John Markoff of the NYTimes has checked in with his take on the issue, Taking the Mystery Out of Web Anonymity.  Herewith:

In effect, the approach would create a “walled garden” in cyberspace, with (virtually) safe neighborhoods and bright (cyber) streetlights to establish a sense of a trusted community.

Mr. Schmidt described it as a “voluntary ecosystem” in which “individuals and organizations can complete online transactions with confidence, trusting the identities of each other and the identities of the infrastructure that the transaction runs on.”

Still, the administration’s plan has divided privacy rights activists. Some applaud the approach; others are apprehensive. “It seems clear,” Lauren Weinstein, the editor of Privacy Journal, wrote “that such a scheme is a pre-emptive push toward what would eventually be a mandated Internet ‘driver’s license’ mentality.”

The News for Nervous Parents Isn't Getting Better.

So, your kid is on Facebook and they've "friended" you and assigned you to the online equivalent of a dead letter box because you're on a friend list that's probably called "Parents Suck" and you never, ever see any postings eventhough beloved child is spending five hours a day feeding the Facebook machine. 

You're pissed off and want the two guys in the picture to the left to help you out.  They have post-its.  They have sharpies in a rainbow of colors.  They have a white board and a Moleskine notebook.  And their physiognomy belies too much time in front of their mulit-monitor displays.  (As if I don't live in a glass house.) 

Bethatasitmay, the New York Times spills some big ink on services paranoid and cautious parents can use to help ensure their little ones are playing nicely on the net.  It's an interesting and compelling idea but let me show you this extract that sums up the reporter's findings:

The companies charge for subscriptions; the lowest costs $10 a month or $100 a year. For harried parents, the question is: Are they worth it?

Certainly not for people who are Web-savvy. The services gather data that can be freely collected with a bit of ardent Web searching.

Okay?  Feel better?  No?  Neither do I.  As someone who is, by any measure, "web savvy," I won't embarrass myself by sharing with you exactly how much I'd be willing to pay for an effective service.  Instead, I will share with you what I believe to be effective parenting on this issue:

1.    Does your kid really, really need a computer or want a computer?  Wouldn't a nice, powerful desktop with a ass-kicking display centrally located in, say, the kitchen where the parent can parent by watching what's crossing the screen when the kid is online.  Let me share this Received Wisdom with you:  If you give your kid a computer, you need to understand that you will have very little control over what happens next.  As much as the makers of NetNanny would like you to believe otherwise, it is not a solution.  Best case, it's a warning system.  Worst case, it is an investment your kid will overturn using well-documented cracks and hacks. 

Or, let's say you're a real mastermind and you've taken your Linksys router and re-imaged it with the fabulous software known as dd-wrt (highly recommended) and this software let's you manage, down to the last inch, what websites your kids can access and when.  And that slapping sound you hear is you patting yourself on your back.  Yeah.  Even that doesn't work because four of your neighbors are running open access points you kid can see from her room. 

No.  Bestowing a computer to your kid is squeezing out all the toothpaste from the tube and you already know it isn't going back in. 

2.    Let's say that your kid really needs to Facebook or run the risk of becoming a social pariah or merely stunted.  Then, what you need to somehow manage (and good luck with this) is to somehow make sure that you can see what your kid is doing from your own Facebook account.  I describe above how your kid can shut you out by putting you on a friends list that's the equivalent of a gulag in Siberia.  But that's where you're going to have to figure out how to parent through this knothole.  My experience indicates this situation leads to confrontation and / or your kid retreating ever deeper and further behind the privacy settings Facebook is actually improving.  Her ability to screen her Facebook from strangers is the same way she will hide from you, dear.  Remember, she's probably just as good as you are with these tools, if not better.  

3.    Life abhors vacuums and boredom is a huge vacuum that is Quite Easily Filled with the Infinite Internet.  A vacuum is probably symptomatic of some sort of parenting gap that can be spanned with chores, outside activities (gardening?), the library (even if they do have online workstations) and sports.  How about homework?  Extra credit assignments?  A hobby like model building?  Skateboarding?  I know, a part-time job!  --You get the picture. 

Because some of you know me, you know that I'm not writing to you from some Perfect Perch where I've untangled all these issues.  However, I've thought about this issue probably more than you have and I have experience born from running down all sorts of dark alleys and dead end streets on this information superhighway.  These perambulations haven't made me any smarter, but I certainly know what the garbage smells like.  

Okay? 

The Clock is Ticking, Dear. The 168 Hour Week.

The thread on personal productivity is vividly colored and more like a rope really.  Recently (let's say during the past five years) the topic leader has been Getting Things Done, penned by author in recovery David Allen. Now, there's a new book that looks like it might step into the bright and favorable light of public approval. 168 Hours by Laura Vanderkam was reviewed in yesterday's WSJ and the notice was both favorable and interesting.  Joseph Tartakovsky, the reviewer, could help himself from taking a few sly pokes at Ms. Vanderkam's POV:

What does have intrinsic worth? Exercise, for one, and efficiency itself. While waiting on a Chef Microwave to cook, Ms. Vanderkam is "in the habit of dropping to the floor and holding a plank pose." She counts minutes, literally, suggesting that we make calls while doing dishes, "pray" while waiting for the elevator, or "study a painting" in the moments before a conference call.

Mr. Tartakovsky also makes the point that the book could have made a great article in Real Simple magazine. 

Other notices have been less qualified.  Seth Godin writes, "We so often live our lives day by day. Laura wants us to think about doing it hour by hour. Living this mantra by example, she gets more done in a day than most of us do in a week."  And Publishers Weekly has this to say, "But given that the author seems to be targeting a very rarefied echelon of upper-middle-class working moms (like herself), the book might have very limited appeal. More alienating, though, is her insistence on pummeling the life out of life. Vanderkam's vision may yield plenty of time to pursue worthy activities, but it's a life leached of color or spontaneity."  Ouch.  Yes, from what I've read of the book, one will need to be in that "rarefied echelon of upper-middle-class" to effect Ms. Vanderkam's suggestion.  Nevertheless, it looks like important material to consider. 

WSJ: Hamlet's Blackberry. Really.

Today's Wall Street Journal brings us a review of another book to shelve next to Clay Shirkey's Cognitive Surplus, Jaron Laneir's You Are Not a Gadget, Nicholas Carr's The Shallows and a couple of other books I need to find out about. 

David Harsany reviews the book and writes this:

It convincingly argues that we've ceded too much of our existence to what he calls Digital Maximalism. Less scold and more philosopher, Mr. Powers certainly bemoans the spread of technology in our lives, but he also offers a compelling discussion of our dependence on contraptions and of the ways in which we might free ourselves from them. I buy it. I need quiet time. [more]

So, I haven't read the book yet, but it seems to me to be a worthy addition to the ever lengthening list.

Shirky v. Carr: The Steel Cage Match Edition.

In previous posts, I've noticed the publication of new books by Nicholas Carr, The Shallows and Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus.  The Big Press is starting to notice this books too and how they are shaping how we think about and understand the impact of the internet on us and society.  A huge wave of ink about these books is breaking over us.  Carr is receiving more attention than Shirky because he's more mainstream, better connected and has the more dire and colorful thesis.  (We can always count on the cameras to focus on the bigger fire.)

The Wall Street Journal spilled a ton of ink on Saturday, June 5, on both books and set up byline duel between Shirky and Carr on the front page of the Weekend section.  I found this interesting because I find the two books to be more complementary than competitive (and I want to put Jaron Lanier's book, You Are Not a Gadget, in the same bin just for the sake of completeness).  Leave it to the media, including my beloved Wall Street Journal, to find or create unnecessary dualities.  

Here are two extracts from the face-off:

Shirky

The response to distraction, then as now, was social structure. Reading is an unnatural act; we are no more evolved to read books than we are to use computers. Literate societies become literate by investing extraordinary resources, every year, training children to read. Now it's our turn to figure out what response we need to shape our use of digital tools. [more]

Carr

What we seem to be sacrificing in all our surfing and searching is our capacity to engage in the quieter, attentive modes of thought that underpin contemplation, reflection and introspection. The Web never encourages us to slow down. It keeps us in a state of perpetual mental locomotion.  [more]   

Please read and discuss.

NYTimes, 6.4.10: Stray Quesitons for Nicholas Carr

The most fun I've had in the past seven years is watching the kerfuffle caused by Nicholas Carr's article in the Harvard Business Review, IT Doesn't Matter (later put between hardcovers and re-titled Does IT Matter).

He's back.  His new book is The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains and it looks like it might be a winner.  Carr's interviewed on the NYTimes website and the interview is a real hoot:

What role does the Internet play in your writing life?

It plays a very beneficial role in helping me to do research efficiently, to find, very quickly and with a minimum of effort, relevant books, articles, and facts. At the same time, it plays a very damaging role in constantly disrupting my train of thought and leading me down endless rabbit holes. Robert Frost had a lover’s quarrel with the world. I’m having a lover’s quarrel with the Net.  [more]

Carr might have kicked off the opinion wave that Jaron Lanier and Clay Shirky are riding and, frankly, I deeply enjoy reading anything contrarian about Our Brilliant Online Future, especially when those opinions are as well-developed and articulate as Messrs. Carr, Shirky and Lanier. 

AT&T Unlimited Dataplan: Same as it Never Was

For better or worse, I've been a moderate early adopter.  I try, very hard, not to invest an any  software or hardware and feel a bit more adventurous when it comes to web based offerings that are free and don't blatantly violate my privacy or that of my friends and business associates. 

So, I didn't invest in a first or second generation iPhone but, as I was already an AT&T customer, was okay buying into a third generation iPhone and I've been very pleased.  I was a bit less than pleased when my first born had to have an iPhone.  A $30 / month unlimited data plan for a junior in high school seemed a bit excessive.  After all, I couldn't expense it or write it off my taxes. 

So it was with a certain amount of chagrin and remorse that I read about AT&T ending its unlimited plan.  David Pogue at the NYTimes says that AT&T's new dataplan might save some consumers money and this is either an indication of Mr. Pogue's astute reportorial skills or AT&T's crack public relations team or a combination of the two.  I'll leave that issue alone for the time being as it might be completely unimportant.  Bethatasitmay, I now find myself in the position of regretting not getting my wife and second child an iPhone when the getting was good.  I might be able to socially engineer something from my friendly AT&T rep down the street but have learned not to rely on the kindness of multinational corporations.  

My head is still stuck in the longago days of internet ISPs who didn't know better than to charge a flat rate back in the day when we weren't watching television online or downloading the complete works of Johnny Mathis.

Web Worker Daily, 5.26.10: 5 Problems With Measuring Social Marketing

When I took a first look at this post from Web Worker Daily, I thought it might be an interesting post on how we might commercialize social media on behalf of our clients.  Then, I read this:

I’m pulling my hair out, and not because there is no way to measure these things, but because I feel that we’re limiting ourselves by using antiquated ways of measuring online activity and interactions. We are also hamstrung by how each site, network and tool defines and dictateaus measurement in their own proprietary terms.

So while we can construct measurement grids, and gather metrics such as friends, fans, followers, connections, likes, comments, posts, views, downloads, @’s, DM’s, retweets, and the like, we are still at the mercy of the companies that develop these sites and tools we’re using. And I’m sure I’m not the only one to notice that these companies often seem to have little or no strategic consideration for their business users (Facebook, anyone?).  [more]

So, in my humble opinion, the author may be missing the point.  When selling social media, one must, must, must make is measurable on its contribution to sales.  Period.  exclamation mark.  We didn't something so completely measurable and then miss the point about why we measure.  I've worked very hard to measure the benefit of public relations and finally found a couple of ways to skin that cat.  Regarding anything internet based, we have a special obligation to our clients -- and to ourselves to deliver real, meaningful measurement that is not only descriptive but prescriptive as to how to make our programs more effective.  --Heaven forbid we cede social media to ... advertising. 

Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky: What to read next

About a million years ago, when the internet was navigated with command line and one had to know what to do when confronted with "$" on the VT200 emulator, I joined a merry band of folks on a NYC community call Panix, still to this day, a high-quality, high-value vista on the internet superhighway.  Right away, I knew I was lost and needed help.  The Panix community was populated with Very Busy and Very Talented people, some of whom were happy to lend a hand to us hopeless newbies and clays was particuarly patient and helpful.  I came to learn that clays was the nom du net for Mr. Shirky who would become famous far beyond the Panix neighborhood. 

clays grew up and did a lot of good consulting work for, among others, Nokia, the BBC, Newscorp, Microsoft, BP, Global Business Network, the Library of Congress, the U.S. Navy, the Libyan government, and Lego.  Because he's a pretty good writer too, he's been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Times, Harvard Business Review and Wired.  He has a great perch at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University where Stacey Horn of EchoNYC     (another pioneer) has taught. 

Anyway, clays has already written a great book, Here Comes Everybody,  but his new book, Cognitive Surplus, looks to be even better.  Here's an extract from the flap copy:

Since we Americans were suburbanized and educated by the postwar boom, we've had a surfeit of intellect, energy, and time-what Shirky calls a cognitive surplus. But this abundance had little impact on the common good because television consumed the lion's share of it-and we consume TV passively, in isolation from one another. Now, for the first time, people are embracing new media that allow us to pool our efforts at vanishingly low cost. The results of this aggregated effort range from mind expanding-reference tools like Wikipedia-to lifesaving-such as Ushahidi.com, which has allowed Kenyans to sidestep government censorship and report on acts of violence in real time.

Shirky argues persuasively that this cognitive surplus-rather than being some strange new departure from normal behavior-actually returns our society to forms of collaboration that were natural to us up through the early twentieth century. He also charts the vast effects that our cognitive surplus-aided by new technologies-will have on twenty-first-century society, and how we can best exploit those effects. Shirky envisions an era of lower creative quality on average but greater innovation, an increase in transparency in all areas of society, and a dramatic rise in productivity that will transform our civilization.

The potential impact of cognitive surplus is enormous. As Shirky points out, Wikipedia was built out of roughly 1 percent of the man-hours that Americans spend watching TV every year. Wikipedia and other current products of cognitive surplus are only the iceberg's tip. Shirky shows how society and our daily lives will be improved dramatically as we learn to exploit our goodwill and free time like never before.

Okay, I'm hooked.  Can't wait.       

"We'd like your cooperation..."

Google can't seem to keep itself out of the hot zone.  Today, Google has decides to become "transparent" regarding government requests for information about people who use Google services and requests from governments for Google to take down information that's posted to its services. 

You can see the map of requests here:

http://www.google.com/governmentrequests/

From this we learn that the U.S. is second to Brazil in requests for information about people who use Google services.  During the period between July 1, 2009 and December 31, 2009, Brazil made 3663 requests and our United States made 3580 requests for information about people using Google services. "Why Brazil?" you may ask.  That's an interesting story having to do with Google's social networking service called Orkut which never made a single dent in the U.S. market but, for reasons having to do with the serendipity of social networking caught fire in Brazil and now Orkut is, for the most part, a Brazilian / Portuguese-speaking social networking site.  (Odd how these things work out, eh?)  

So, the United States made 3580 requests for data and 123 removal requests.  According to Google, it complied with 80.5% of the removal requests fully or partially.  Of those requests that Google complied with sixty-three regarded YouTube videos and seven additional YouTube videos were removed by court order.  

Of course, we're describing requests for information that have traveled over the internet and anyone who knows anything about the internet probably knows that the NSA can grab anything that crosses a piece of fiber or copper or the air so these official request numbers are very interesting but might as well be a red herring. 

Then, there was the news from the Wall Street Journal yesterday that privacy officials from ten countries demanding that Google build in more privacy.  You can read the .pdf of the letter here:  Letter to Eric Schmidt from Ten Countries

What interests me the most is that these diplomats are getting down to business, very specific business, by the second paragraph and on to the third:

However, we are increasingly concerned that, too often, the privacy rights of the world's citizens are being forgotten as Google rolls out new technological applications.  We were disturbed by your recent rollout of new technological applications.  We were disturbed by your recent rollout of the Google Buzz social networking application, which betrayed a disappoint9ing disregard for fundamental privacy norms and laws.   Moreover, this was not the first time you have failed to take adequate account of privacy considerations when launching new services. 

Wow.  Just wow.

Now you'll have to excuse me so I can find a solid VPN provider and get back up-to-speed on PGP. 

 

Recommended: "How to socialize your website."

This article posted by Kipp Bodnar doesn't exactly break any new ground but it does offer four steps or paths each of which will work, for sure.  See for yourself here.             

 

McKinsey Quarterly, April 10: A new way to measure word-of-mouth marketing

A reminder of the obvious. 

Indeed, word of mouth is the primary factor behind 20 to 50 percent of all purchasing decisions. Its influence is greatest when consumers are buying a product for the first time or when products are relatively expensive, factors that tend to make people conduct more research, seek more opinions, and deliberate longer than they otherwise would. And its influence will probably grow: the digital revolution has amplified and accelerated its reach to the point where word of mouth is no longer an act of intimate, one-on-one communication. Today, it also operates on a one-to-many basis: product reviews are posted online and opinions disseminated through social networks. Some customers even create Web sites or blogs to praise or punish brands.

As online communities increase in size, number, and character, marketers have come to recognize word of mouth’s growing importance. But measuring and managing it is far from easy. We believe that word of mouth can be dissected to understand exactly what makes it effective and that its impact can be measured using what we call “word-of-mouth equity”—an index of a brand’s power to generate messages that influence the consumer’s decision to purchase. Understanding how and why messages work allows marketers to craft a coordinated, consistent response that reaches the right people with the right content in the right setting. That generates an exponentially greater impact on the products consumers recommend, buy, and become loyal to.

[more]

WSJ, 4.19.10: Is Internet Civility an Oxymoron?

Okay.  It was difficult for me to get past the headline.  As someone who has been kicking around the the interents for years, and a complete believer in Godwin's Law (because I was on the Well and Usenet and Panix boards for years)

A Web site launched this month called Unvarnished goes so far as to make anonymous comments its business model. It invites "community-contributed, business-focused assessments of professional performance" of named individuals, with commenters kept anonymous, which means readers have no way to assess their interests or biases. The subjects of comments can't remove them.

<snip>

The Web is a great liberator, giving millions of people the ability to offer opinions with the ease once reserved for, say, newspaper columnists. The downside is that comment overload and anonymity create more noise than wisdom. Since it's now clear human nature hasn't improved with the transition to digital media, we should cheer efforts to make it as easy for readers to decide which commenters to trust as it has become to post the comments.

[more]

WSJ, 4.19.10: iPad Struggles at Some Colleges

In today's WSJ, I read a fascinating story about how the iPad is having difficulty on some college campuses.  As the headline says, the iPad "struggles."  The story is written by Melissa Korn (please visit her website) and Ms. Korn was probably in a hurry and didn't think this story through but it's a bit amazing that Ms. Korn didn't take the time to track this story back to a spate of stories about the very same issue when the iPhone went to market. 

Let's think this through for a second, okay?

College students are showing up on campus with iPads that are hitting college WLAN networks.  Right.  What else might be hitting those WLAN networks at George Washington University, Princeton University, Cornell University and Seton Hall, all named in the story.  Well, students on those campuses might very well using the iPad.  Those students might very well be showing up with iPads and my guess is that they probably are.  Of course, a higher percentage of students might be coming to campus with any number of devices that make use of the WLAN, such as netbooks, plain old notebook computers and an increasing number of completely new types of devices / monitors / gizmos that use WLAN. 

So why iPad being singled out?  Let's think about it for a second.

The reporter picks up a signal that some students / kids at some name-brand schools are having trouble watching YouTube, downloading movies from iTunes, or whatever people do with iPads.  (As I don't have an iPad, I won't suppose what people are using an iPad for.)  Let's also say that everybody who has any sort of WLAN device are loading and using WLAN apps like they never have before.  --I can believe that, can you?  

So the reporter contacts the schools, reaches the public affairs offices, maybe even directly reaches someone in the IT department at some of the schools.  What does she hear?  "Yup.  Those new fangled iPads are hitting the network and are pulling down WLAN availability."

It's Apple's fault.  It's Apple's fault that it invented the iPad and that kids use it.  

I wonder if Ms. Korn asked any of the people she contacted about how IT planned for WLAN availability?  How those WLAN networks were built?  What capacity did IT plan for?  And I won't even get into the issues of the gear used to build those networks as I've been involved in one or two or three or four of the companies that make WLAN gear.  Can you plan for infinite consumption?   Ms. Korn has impeccable credentials, and is extremely bright, but she doesn't shine her light onto the real problem.

Let's puzzle this out.  Let's use the technique we've learned from the cinema-photographer and we are building a mise-en-scène where the perspective pulls back from the image of the Seaton Halll student who is stymied while trying to download the latest episode of whatever to reveal his dormitory and the entire campus and the city and intercut "flashbacks" to people pulling cat5 cable then we cut to a shot of people at home broadcasting a WLAN signals and then a shot of someone signing up for the actually well-thought-out policy AT&T has requiring iPhone users to sign up for an unlimited dataplan, or the way Amazon brought the Kindle to market with the data / network included --- because we want more.  The light reflecting off the screen become blinding. 

And it wants more.  It is an infinite appetite for more, more, more.

So, are iPads pulling down networks at some schools?  Maybe.  Getting an Apple iPad into a headline is a nice way to build that string.  It wants more. 

Conclusion:  It isn't a story.  

Regarding Malcom McLaren

I wasn't was what one might call a "student" of Malcom McLaren and I was NOT a fan of the Sex Pistols. (It was all over my head.)  But I did have an appreciation of Malcom McLaren and what he was able to accomplish and his style.  This past week he passed away at 64, after only living three or four lives. 

Here's from the NYTimes obituary:

In the 1970s, Mr. McLaren returned to his native London from New York, where he had briefly managed the New York Dolls in the waning days of that band’s initial flush of fame. With his business partner and girlfriend at the time, Vivienne Westwood, they renamed their clothing shop Sex, and Mr. McLaren set about putting together his own rock act of untested British youth, which became the Sex Pistols.

“I’m much more of a magician than a musician,” he told The Globe and Mail of Toronto in 1985. “I steal other people’s songs and try to make them better.”

Mr. McLaren was a keen student of the French Situationists, who believed in staging absurdist or provocative incidents as a spur to social change. He arranged for the Sex Pistols to sign their contract with A&M Records outside Buckingham Palace and organized a performance of “God Save the Queen” on the Thames, outside the Houses of Parliament, on a boat named the Queen Elizabeth. The police quickly intervened, ratifying the group’s incendiary reputation.

In recent years his name was linked with film, television and radio projects, most of them never realized, although he did help produce the film “Fast Food Nation” and presented two series for BBC2 radio, “Malcolm McLaren’s Musical Map of London” and “Malcolm McLaren’s Life and Times in L.A.”

[more]

WSJ, 3.29.10: Nestlé Takes a Beating on Social-Media Sites

Well, now the worm turns.  Nestlé hasn't been a worldwide corporate hero for, oh, a couple of decades.  Between baby formula, candy bars, deforestation of the rain forests,

Here's from the WSJ: 

Greenpeace, which is coordinating the protest, says Nestlé hasn't done enough, and is continuing to buy the disputed firm's oil in blended batches sold by third-party suppliers.

Nestlé says it is pressuring its providers to scrutinize their supply chains to keep that from happening, but it has had trouble making itself heard above the din. The difficulty with social media, says Ms. Backes, is "to show that we are listening, which we obviously are, while not getting involved in a shouting match."

Activist groups have long used Web sites, grass-roots email campaigns and videos to publicize their causes. But the attack on Nestlé is part of a new wave of digitally savvy protests, marketing experts say.

"This is the place where major corporations are very vulnerable," says Daniel Kessler, press officer at Greenpeace.

[more]

I'm fascinated, by the use of social media as attack media, probably because someday I'll be I have figure out how to defend a company that's under attack. 

Tricycle Magazine, Winter 2009: How multitasking leads to ignorance

I heard about multitasking a long time ago, in the context of computing.  But then more and more people talk about how they multitasking.  Well, I'm surely not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I knew that people who claimed they could multitask had no idea what they were talking about. 

There is a wonderful article in the Winter 2010 issue of Tricycle, a Buddhist magazine, about the danger of multitasking.  In a article called Busy Signal, by Andrew Olendzki, he approaches the topic from a Buddhist perspective.  Here are some excerpt:

When the Buddha says, "I know of now single thing ore conducive to great harm than an unrestrained mind," 
When the mind tries to do several things at once, it does not do any of them every well. 
This is an empirical act proven by numerous experiments, and it is easy to test out for yourself:  try texting a message while catching the latest baseball scorese on the radio and discussing some recent relationship difficulty with your partner. 

Meanwhile, peace is accessible .  This, too, is an empirically demonstrable fact:  try turning off the radio, the phone, the computer, and the TV;  sit comfortable, in a quiet place, relaxing the body and mind; mindfully breathe in, mindfully breathe out, and abandon -- just for now -- any thought or response the tends to disperse and divide your awareness. 

[more]

NYTimes, 3.30.10: Fluttering Feet, and Now Fingers That Tweet

And so we reach and new "spin" on the Tweeter-sphere.  According to the NYTimes,  According to the Times, ballet dancers are tweeting about their careers and experiences.   For me, this raises a couple of interesting questions:

1.    Let's say that a percussionist in the rear of the SF Symphony decided to make comments about his fellow players and, perhaps even Michael Tilson Thomas.  What would you do about that?

2.  On the other hand, this is a rare and fascinating to engaging the audience.

3.    On the third hand, if I was the PR-guy for the artistic company engaged in Twitter, I would absolutely stop every negative comment, find people who consistently post positive and then watch them like a hawk.  Hey, it isn't a brilliant strategy, but I'm not writing about anything too complicated.

By the way, read this tweet post about Peter Martins:  "I've heard the voice of God nd he is and angry God with a Danish accent who doesn't like my acting."  I think I found the first nomination to have their texting privileges taken away from them.  

And one more thing, I get the whole idea about the internet finding censorship and routing around it.  I'm just believe a best effort and conveying the message that harsh criticize probably isn't good for one's career.  It simply lacks and esprit d;corps. 

David Strom: Pay Attention.

I try to pay attention to the smartest people in the room.  And David Strom has been the smartest guy in the IT room for quite some time.  He's made a post today about using laptops on airplanes that will make you think twice about updating that .ppt on the way to the meeting.

The problem is that most people get lost in the wonderfulness of the Web and tend to forget that their seatmates can watch every move, see every keystroke (it doesn’t take much to follow along, especially at the speed that many people type), and collect all sorts of information. By the end of one flight I was on, I had Larry (not his real name) the HP sales rep’s Amazon account, read several of his emails, got to see his new sales presentations that HP corporate sales office had sent him, figured out that he was a recent hire as he was checking HP’s Intranet to understand some corporate travel policies, found out who his clients that he had just visited were, and more.

Now, I wasn’t really paying that much attention. I was tired, and just wanted to be left by myself for the trip. And I think we exchanged maybe ten words between us all told. But if I really wanted to do some damage, I could be all over Larry’s accounts by now (he had some nice taste from what I could see he was looking for on Amazon, too).

[more]

Strategy and Business: Five Gates to Innovation

This article starts off a bit slow]but then an interesting opinion  on innovation.

,As the Gorilla project raced toward its last stage gate, it soaked up more and more resources at Corning; as a result, other projects had to be pared away. Keeping business units motivated in the face of cutbacks is one of the toughest challenges in managing innovation. Corning’s response is to maintain the backlog of development efforts as live but unstaffed and to avoid laying off researchers in favor of moving them to ongoing development programs. “If there is an absence of pull in the marketplace, a fundamental flaw in the technology, or if the investment is unaffordable, the project manager is responsible for bringing that information forward,” CTO Miller says. “He’ll do that if he feels safe that if we shut it down, his people are going someplace else within the company. Otherwise, self-preservation kicks in.

[more]

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]