Month: February 2008

Now that the Super Bowl‘s over and done with, attention switches back to the 2008 Presidential election, particularly the caucuses and primaries due to be held tomorrow, on what is termed Super Tuesday.

After reading Seven Days in May when I was around 12, I decided to read everything that Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey had ever written. Which included a book called Convention, reading which spurred me to follow the US Presidential election quite closely ever since. I have no idea why, I guess there’s something about the byzantine process that makes me feel at home; somehow, it manages to leave the bureaucracy of the Empire, Raj and even Writers’ Building quaking in its wake.

[Incidentally, I love the Knebel quote in Wikipedia: “Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics“.]

In conversation a few days ago, someone asked me to explain what Super Tuesday was, and for that matter how the US President was elected. I wasn’t happy with my explanation, and decided I’d blog it; that way I learn by putting myself through the discipline of writing it down, I learn from my mistakes, I learn from your comments. And maybe some of you will learn something as well.

So here goes:

Elected by electoral college, not by popular vote 

The President of the United States of America is actually elected indirectly, via an electoral college, on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December. [Technically, if the electoral college does not produce a majority winner, with at least 270 votes, then the process passes to the House of Representatives who then vote to elect the President, but this is an arcane amendment].

As a result, what we know as Election Day, the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, is not actually the day on which the President is voted for. It is actually the day when the electoral college is elected. The votes of the electoral college, however, are normally already pledged by then, state by state, party by party, through a process of caucus and primary and national convention. [Again technically, the electors have no legal requirement to vote as directed in the caucus or primary. But they do].

It is therefore possible for a candidate to win “the popular vote” in the November election (where the presidential candidate names do appear on the ballot) while still losing the election proper (which is based on the pre-pledged voting intentions of the candidates gaining election to the college of electors). This has happened, even as recently as 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote, yet failed to get majority in the electoral college. John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B Hayes and Benjamin Harrison, like George W Bush, all became President while losing the popular vote.

Delegates selected for national convention by caucus or primary

The actual selection of the presidential candidate by a party takes place at that party’s national convention, usually held in the August preceding a presidential election. Caucuses are local meetings which select delegates to district meetings which select delegates to regional meetings which select delegates to state meetings which select delegates to the national convention. Primaries compress all this and select delegates to the national convention.

Both caucuses as well as primaries can be closed (only available to registered party members) or open to all. Both caucuses as well as primaries can pledge delegate votes on a proportional basis or on a winner-take-all basis. There is also a concept of a semi-closed primary, open but requiring prior registration.

National convention selects presidential candidates as well as party platform

The party’s candidates for the electoral college are already known by the time the national convention comes along, so the objective of the convention is simple: nominate candidates for president and vice-president, sort out the party platform, do the necessary rah-rah to unify the party: remember that the convention follows maybe 18 months of bitter fighting within the party, as candidates battle against each other.

So. Razzmatazz. Caucus or Primary. National Convention. Election of Electors. Election of President. And that’s it.

Please do tell me what I got wrong, so that I can understand the process better.

Yossi Vardi has been an inspiration to me for many years, and thanks to him, I was able to make DLD in Munich this year. [Thanks, Yossi]. Who else but Yossi would seek to prove, definitively, that snails dragging CDs or DVDs could outstrip ADSL? It was partly through his example that I learnt about not taking myself too seriously, not getting hung up about my own propaganda. Yossi does that to people.

While I couldn’t make the Sunday sessions, I had the chance to watch them on video later. I was particularly fascinated by Paulo Coelho‘s keynote, Creating Universes: if you want to watch it, you can do so here.

Paulo speaks movingly about three aspects of the impact of the internet: language, copyright and community. On language, one of the points that stuck in my head was his description of the process by which “thee” and “thou” became “you”; he suggested this took a few hundred years, and contrasted that with the shift from “you” to “u” in this world of SMS and Twitter. Intriguing. On community, what stood out for me was his plea for connectedness, how lonely the life of an author can be, how important it was to have a community he could speak to, and how the internet, and social networks, was making it possible for him.

But the meat in the sandwich was his speech on copyright. Basically he owned up to self-piracy, to aiding and abetting the creation of a Pirate Coelho site, a site where BitTorrent links to pirate versions of his books were made easily accessible. You can get more coverage on what he said and did here and here. I was particularly taken with the quotes on the TorrentFreak site:

In 2001, I sold 10,000 hard copies. And everyone was puzzled. We came from zero, from 1000, to 10,000. And then the next year we were over 100,000. […]

I thought that this is fantastic. You give to the reader the possibility of reading your books and choosing whether to buy it or not. […]

So, I went to BitTorrent and I got all my pirate editions… And I created a site called The Pirate Coelho.

The key statement that Coelho makes is this:

You give to the reader the possibility of reading your books and choosing whether to buy it or not.

Coelho makes some other salient points. He confessed to not having the rights to some of his books, particularly the foreign-language translations. And that made me think about music and cover versions and mashups and just how messy all this has become. If a book is translated 50 years after it was written, does that mean it goes out of copyright in the original language and stays in copyright in the translated version? Does that mean no one else can translate into that other language? Just musing.

That reminds me. Do you remember a 1983 Bill Forsyth film called Local Hero? It’s one of my all-time favourite films, not least because of a wonderful Mark Knopfler soundtrack. [incidentally, I haven’t yet heard much about Knopfler’s latest, Kill to Get Crimson. Any views out there?]

In the film, one of the most memorable moments for me was when the salesman-type, played by Peter Riegert, gets all worked up arriving horribly late at this tiny fishing village, bangs uncharitably hard and loud on the door of the “hotel” he’s booked into (which happens to be the local pub); the landlord, played by Denis Lawson, finally pops his head out of an upstairs window and says “We don’t lock doors here“.

Not locking things up. Making things free. These are lessons that authors like Paulo Coelho are learning, and they’re learning something about abundance economics as well: if you make abundant things free, then you can create a larger market for the scarcer thing. People pay a premium for natural scarcity, not artificial nonsense like DVD Region Codes.

Making things free is not easy. Take a look at this 1999 BBC.com story about what Stevan Harnad was doing then, and, if you have the time, continue to follow it at this 2000 site. A cognitive scientist, I hadn’t read much of his work before, and writing this post has given me the impetus to correct that. One of the wonderful side effects of blogging.

We live in a strange world. Where else could we even begin to comprehend headlines like “Legal ways around copyright for one’s own giveaway texts”? Anyway, I’m glad that people like Harnad exist, glad they make the time to teach us about some of these issues. [An aside. Reading through some of the research for this post, I landed up travelling down an unusual road. Actual case histories of what happens when someone steals something free. The example in question was where a large consignment of free newspapers on a campus was confiscated by authorities….]

Even when it is possible and legal to give something away, it is not always that easy. Over 20 years ago, in a film called Brewster’s Millions, Richard Pryor plays a struggling sportsman desperate to get rid of $30m in precisely a month, in order to qualify for receiving $300m. He’s not allowed to tell anyone about his problem, and the money he gives away gets an annoying habit of coming back in enhanced technicolor.

Sounds paradoxical: the more you give away, the more you get. But to me it’s not. It’s The Because Effect, as Doc taught me all those years ago. When something moves from being scarce to being abundant, stop trying to make money with the abundant thing. Give it away. Make money because of that abundant thing, not with that abundant thing. Concentrate on what’s become scarce as a result, and make money with that.

if you’re interested in this sort of thing, then there are two recent articles worth reading. The first, by James Wisdom-of-Crowds Surowiecki. Writing in the New Yorker, he looks at The Piracy Paradox, drawing some interesting lessons from the fashion industry, looking at where imitation pays off, the creation of new markets, the affordability issue, and related subjects.

In a similar note, I dug up an unusual article in Reason magazine from about a year ago. Written by Henry Jenkins (whose recent books, Convergence Culture and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers I really enjoyed), Jenkins looked at the effect that unauthorised copying of Japanese animation had on the US market. The moral of the story is so simple it bears repeating. As Paulo Coelho said so eloquently, if you give people a chance to read something before buying it, if you make it easy for them to try your book out, then, once they figure out they like it, they will buy it. They. Will. Buy. It.

This is not just about books, it’s about all digital culture. if it is digital culture then it can be abundant. if it can be abundant then make it abundant. Concentrate on making money on the less abundant things, throw the abundant things around like confetti. If people like what they read or watch or listen to, they will be back. For the concerts, for the memorabilia, for the CDs, for the DVDs, for the bonus tracks, for everything.

incidentally, no post of this type on this subject can be complete without mentioning Creative Commons. I am delighted with what they are doing with this symbol below:

I love the words that go with the symbol:

A protocol enabling people to ASSERT that a work has no copyright or WAIVE any rights associated with a work.

How polite.

I can remember a time when people thought e-mail was a complete waste of time. I can remember a time when spreadsheets and storyboarding software were similarly disdained. In fact, I can even remember a time when no senior executive would be seen dead near a computer. You know something? It wasn’t that long ago, maybe 20 years ago?

[Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin, the co-inventors of Visicalc, at an Indian meal recently in Cambridge, MA]

I can remember a time when people thought the internet was a complete waste of time. When browsers had no future, when search engines were nothing more than toys. It wasn’t that long ago that Google was something that a few people played with, and the rest thought…. that they were wasting time. I can remember a time when people thought eBay was a plaything, someplace that people went….to waste time. I can even remember a time when packages marked Amazon or Fedex were unheard-of in enterprise mail trolleys. You know something? It wasn’t that long ago, maybe 10 years ago.

I can remember a time when people thought social media, software and networks were a complete waste of time. When Facebookers were fools, Twitterers were twits, when even blogs and wikis and IM were viewed with deep suspicion, when everyone thought that the people who were using them…..were wasting time. You know something? It wasn’t that long ago. Maybe it’s still happening now.

I can remember a time when people thought Cluetrain was a joke, that the authors should have stayed in the Sixties and kept their mouths shut. That reading Cluetrain (and the books that followed it) was a complete waste of time.

[Doc Searls, David Weinberger and Chris Locke, caught wasting time at Defrag in Denver a couple of months ago.]

Wasting time on things that have no commercial value. I know I’ve written about it before, but I feel there is a point still to be made. Is it a new point? Perhaps not. Let me remind you of some of the things that have been said — said by powerful and important people — in the last century or so:

“Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.” —Marechal Ferdinand Foch
“The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?” —David Sarnoff’s associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.

“Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” –-H.M. “Harry” Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927.

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.” —Western Union internal memo, 1876.

“But what … is it good for?” –Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.

“The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a ‘C,’ the idea must be feasible.” –A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith’s paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. (Smith went on to found FedEx.)

[My thanks to this site run by JD Paul for conveniently collecting a bunch of such sayings].

Let me illustrate something. The figures above represent a Mobius strip (on the top), a Klein Surface (in the bottom left) and a Fibonacci Sequence (on the bottom right). While all three concepts are intriguing from a theoretical viewpoint (especially to amateur mathematicians), the practical application of those concepts has always fascinated me. When I learnt that people had figured out that conveyor belts should be designed on Mobius strip principles (in order to even out the wear and tear) my heart sang. When I learnt that Fibonacci sequences could be used to predict the number of leaves on a tree, the number of branches on a tree, or even the growth of rabbit populations, I was spellbound. In fact, when I was a young insomniac, I used to count sheep in Fibonacci just for the hell of it, and landed up staying awake enjoying the counting! Now, while I haven’t yet heard of good “commercial” uses of a Klein Surface, I remain intrigued. Intrigued enough to read the Wikipedia entry while writing this, and delighting in finding out that what I used to refer to as a Klein Bottle is actually a misnomer, it was meant to be a Klein Surface and got corrupted, in the original German, from flache to flasche. Intrigued enough to be willing to be delighted as and when I find out that someone has found a sensible use for the Klein Surface.

I am not a fan of technology for technology’s sake; while I am curious about many things, I am not suddenly recommending that knowledge-worker businesses start large-scale experimentation with emerging tools. But. And it’s an important but. That does not mean we do not experiment at all. So, when I see emergent tools with the following characteristics, I get very interested:

Low barriers to entry, in investment costs, running costs and prerequisite skills
Low TCO, open architecture, no proprietary lock-ins, either overt or covert
Evidence of take-up by Generation M
Emergence of a community of participation in an open multisided marketplace around the product or service

The *possibility* that knowledge work can become more effective and more efficient, not just in the enterprise, but in health, education and welfare. Globally

These are the things I see when I write about Facebook or about Twitter. When I play with YouTube or Flickr. When I play around with Dopplr or Vodpod or BlogFriends or School Of Everything. I see possibilities. Possibilities of improving our lives. Possibilities that excite me.

That’s why I get really interested when I see fire departments using Twitter. Manufacturing concerns using YouTube. [My thanks to Brian Humphrey for the LAFD Twitter info, and to Alan Buxton for pointing me towards MFGX. See, I don’t just read comments, I follow trails to see what the commenter’s blog is about, and often branch off from there, meandering, serendipitously, and learning from it all]

And it’s not just to admire from afar. I have been rejoicing in watching people where I work use the web first, that is so refreshing. When I ask for a demo of something I get a YouTube link, when I ask for an explanation of something I get a Flickr link. Web first. As long as it’s open, global, real-time. Web first.

An aside: I remember a time when I used to play a lot of contract bridge; there was a bunch of us who met regularly, my father would join us every now and then, and we learnt a lot. Me and my friends, we revelled in sophisticated modern bidding conventions, based around a modified Precision with a strong “phony” club, four-card majors, Stayman, weak twos in the majors, a splinter “multi” two diamonds, that kind of thing. And we spent a long time getting very precise messages to our partners using these sophisticated techniques. One day we were taken apart by some of our younger friends, who had hit upon a far better system. They just showed their cards to each other, quietly, while we were pontificating on our complex bids. Illegal, but highly effective.

Using YouTube or Flickr is a bit like that; instead of the complexity and sophistication underlying Powerpoint, you just take a photograph or a video and post it. If the goal is excellence in communication, we should bear it in mind when we work in design.

That’s why I enjoyed using RippleRap at Le Web. Of course I was biased; after all, the tools had been built by colleagues of mine; but I would have used it even if someone else had built it, because it fulfilled the “webness” test. And that’s important. [What’s RippleRap? I wanted to use TiddlyWiki as a collaborative presentation tool, a place where I could put up brief text and graphics and allow people in the audience to make notes while I spoke, and, more importantly, to share the notes they made. I’m really grateful to the team as to how quickly they came up with something that worked, and worked well. So here’s a screenshot of RippleRap below:

It’s not just the Osmosoft team that think like this; it’s been very encouraging to see “commercial” uses of YouTube, as evinced by the number of instructional videos out there, and for that matter promotional ones as well, as shown below:

Some of these issues take me back quite a few years: it was probably 2004 when I first read that IBM were the single biggest “user” of eBay. Today, for example, you can go to eBay to learn about IBM’s leasing and financing options. Web first. [There was a time when I used to tell people that IBM had a System 38 series because they had at least 37 other proprietary architectures. How they’ve changed. Amazing.]

My apologies for the rambling nature of this post, it gets that way sometimes. Where am I going with all this? It’s simple. There are many people who criticise social media tools because they perceive them as ways to waste time; these criticisms in turn enter the consciousness of large enterprises and form part of enterprise immune systems, ably and effectively shutting out the pioneers who are seeking to derive value from the tools.

We haven’t figured out a way to solve the problem of low knowledge worker productivity. [Sometimes, I get the feeling we spend more time trying to figure out how to measure knowledge worker productivity, rather than concentrate on raising productivity levels. We spend more time mutating benchmarks to our purposes, throwing away the opportunity to make quantum improvements as a result. In fact that’s my First Law of Benchmarks: If gains are so low that you need benchmarks to prove the existence of the gains, they’re probably not worth having in the first place.

While the competition was busy protecting proprietary architectures, IBM transformed itself around Linux and services. And the competition sank without trace. The same thing is about to happen, with social media tools. A few companies will become big winners, the rest will disappear without trace, to be replaced by a new order. When I see Facebook, I see Bloomberg. There’s a new “buy side” in a new set of digital markets, and they’re setting the rules. Markets where information is liquid. And digital.

As William Gibson said, the future’s here, it’s just unevenly distributed. That description is apt when applied to the implementation and take-up of social media tools. So when you next decide all this is a waste of time, think IBM, think Bloomberg, think eBay, think Google, think Amazon. Or even think Goldman Sachs. Think why Goldman Sachs has a very high percentage of employees using Facebook. Goldman Sachs, wasting time? You better believe it. And making money while they do it.