Day: 29 June 2006

I remember a tale about an American golfer many years ago, I think his name was Big Mo. [Google couldn’t help me out here, so if any of you can corroborate any of this please comment away].

Big Mo was a good golfer. A very good golfer. Now this was in the days of driving for show and putting for …. lamps and fridges and … toasters.

It seemed he could win any tournament he entered. And, just to prove it, he was always in the lead at the end of the third day. But somehow, somehow, he used to lose it in the final round. Choke regularly enough to make Greg Norman feel good. [Incidentally, Greg is no choker in my book, he’s been a wonderful golfer to watch, a fantastic sportsman with a great attitude, and, I believe, the only golfer to have lost a playoff in each major. Now there’s a record that Tiger and Phil will find hard to match, a most unusual Grand Slam].

Back to Big Mo. He got into this groove of leading into the final round and then blowing it. After this happened a few times, a plucky reporter conjured up enough gumption to ask Big Mo why. And he truculently replied “Already got a toaster”.

Good golfers win tournaments. Great golfers can choose where they finish, focused on the particular position they need to finish in. And to do that, you have to lead going into the final round.

Anyone know more about Big Mo and can fill in the blanks, please do let me know.

Now to the point of this post. Malcolm, a colleague and good friend, and a fellow blogger (he is the Man In The Doorway in Accidental Light), shares an unusual interest with me. We both like AC Weisbecker. It was through him and Ken, an ex-colleague, that I found out about Cosmic Banditos and did myself an injury reading it.

How would I describe the book? It’s what RageBoy could have written if he lived in Big Sur instead of Boulder.
The author of Cosmic Banditos, AC Weisbecker, as mysterious a man as Thomas Pynchon, has written a new book. [An aside, apropos Weisbecker and Pynchon. I seem to remember an anecdote where AC went into a shop and enquired after Cosmic Banditos, trying to see whether the cult Malcolm refers to was real, and whether it was true that no copies were available. And the bookseller took him aside and told him confidentially that he, AC Weisbecker, didn’t really exist, and that the author was actually Pynchon writing under an assumed name.]

Back to Malcolm. Read his posts on the subject here and here. And then go order Weisbecker’s book if you are sufficiently intrigued. Use the links Malcolm provides. Let’s see if we can collectively get Malcolm into the Big Mo position, leading into the final round. Then leave him to figure out how to lose.

Because Malcolm can’t keep it simple. He wants the third prize. Only the third prize. Not first, not second. Only third. Nothing more, nothing less. And that needs a special brand of viral marketing…..

I’ve been thinking more about this ever since my last post on the subject, a whole day or so ago. And I remembered something I’d heard Clay Shirky say:

#3b. Good tools allow users to do stupid things.

A good tool, a tool which maximizes the possibilities for unexpected innovation from unknown quarters, has to allow the creation of everything from brilliant innovation through workmanlike normalcy all the way through hideous dreck. Tools which try to prevent users from making mistakes enter into a tar pit, because this requires that in addition to cause and effect, a tool has to be burdened with a second, heuristic sense of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. In the short run, average quality can be raised if a tool intervenes to prevent legal but inefficent uses, but in the long haul, that strategy ultimately hampers development by not letting users learn from their mistakes.

OK, this was many years ago, at a time when the Web was still in its infancy. For those who are interested, the entire article is available here.

The value proposition of Collaborative Work and Wisdom-of-Crowds and Emergence and Blink and Serendipity are all in some way connected with Polanyi’s Tacit Knowledge definition, something we know but cannot articulate. Knowledge management specialists have forever been haranguing us with the Know what we Know, Know what we Don’t Know and Don’t Know what we Don’t Know triad.

And somewhere in that space is my concern about Nanny Languages. Shirky makes some key points in his article (published over eight years ago): the value of View Source, being able to see “on demand” how someone does something, how open and refreshing that is (Note to self: Is View Source a real patent, one that sticks to the meaning of patent?); the separation of site design from software engineering (yes I can hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth all the way here); the inversion of interface from Resides-In-Software-And-Is-Applied-To-Data to Resides-In-Data-And-Is-Applied-To-Software (more wailing and gnashing, I guess).

Life is about learning. We have to ensure that language does not restrict that learning. And nanny languages do restrict that learning, and will therefore atrophy over time. Or adapt to become less nannified.

By the way, it is worth having a look at what Clay says at the end of his article:

Furthermore, while there were certainly aspects of that revolution which will not be easily repeated, there are several current areas of inquiry – multi-player games (e.g. Half Life, Unreal), shared 3D worlds (VRML, Chrome), new tagset proposals (XML, SMIL), new interfaces (PilotOS, Linux), which will benefit from examination in light of the remarkable success of the Web. Any project with an interface likely to be of interst to end users (create your own avatar, create your own desktop) can happen both faster and better if these principles are applied.

Not bad for 1998.