Category: Four pillars

No, not the 1966 Antonioni movie (which I was young enough to enjoy illicitly in 1970) but its Brooklyn remake by Vinnie.

It didn’t matter that it was late at night in Chennai, that I had a very early morning flight, and that the broadband connection I has was less than perfect, that it took many attempts to finish watching the show. And what a show.
I just loved everything about Vinnie’s efforts. And it encapsulated a number of lessons for me, an all-too-brief definition of what is possible.

How individuals working in teams can do things never done before. Learn about the possibilities. Take risks yet be careful. Tell people about what they want to do with passion and voice and then have the joy of actually doing what they want. Sample bits of this and that without caring about rights or wrongs, not intending to make money out of the sampling per se. Doing no evil. But doing something different. Disruptive in a gapingvoid way. Engaging. Micro capital raising. Co-creating. Sharing.

Having fun. [Thanks to Gordon and Frank for the link.]

A coda. Could you imagine doing this with anything but a Mac? The idea, the fund-raise, making the video, the lot. It’s all Mac.

Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch.

And you read your Emily Dickinson

And I my Robert Frost

And we note our place with bookmarkers

That measure what we’ve lost… Simon and Garfunkel, The Dangling Conversation

The more I think about it, the more I realise what incredible changes there are in value creation when we co-create and trade and exchange across open marketplaces.

Now I can see exactly where people I like and trust “note [their] place with bookmarkers”.

Now the bookmarkers don’t have to measure what is lost. [Except, of course, the evils sprung up by bad law and bad IPR and bad DRM].

They measure, at least in some part, what is gained. If tags are bookmarkers and things like Technorati are measures. But that’s for another day.

Today I decided to spend some time with Joi Ito’s blog. Not just read it, spend time on it. And it was an exhilarating ride.
First, I experienced the Chicken Little approach to transparency, a story Joi repeats from a meeting he was at. Priceless.

Second, via Joi’s post about Wikia, I decided to take a wander around the Wikia sites that were forming. Here’s a list of some popular Wikia sites:

1. Alternative History, for creating fictional alternative histories.
2. Creatures, about Creatures, the artificial life computer game series
3. d20 NPC, generic NPC and monster stat blocks for the d20 System.
4. Dofus, information on the Dofus MMORPG.
5. Doom, for fans of the Doom series of computer games
6. Memory Alpha, a Star Trek encyclopedia
7. Muppet, based on the Muppet franchise, including Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock
8. Star Wars, about the Star Wars movies and spin-offs
9. Uncyclopedia, a parody of Wikipedia
10. WikiFur, information on furry community and culture

Tells you something about the way cyberspace is interacting with the real world, doesn’t it? Fictional alternative histories. Muppets and Star Wars and Star Trek. And various forms of MMOG. And, just to “legitimise” the list a la Christopher Locke’s organic gardening*, we have “information on furry community and culture”. [*More on this another day]

Third, while on the subject of real versus virtual, but staying with Joi Ito, I then saw a Philip Torrone story about credit cards and virtual environments and the Lindex exchange.

Wow.

I have already seen stories about “well-to-do” “youth” “outsourcing” the playing of the first few “vanilla” levels of games to “India“, only to take up the reins when a more interesting phase of the game is entered and the requisite number of lives and collateral and artifacts have been earned/collected. Co-creation of a different sort. For well-to-do and youth and outsourcing and vanilla and India please go ahead and substitute with whatever works for you…..the principle’s the same and it’s here to stay.
We should not underestimate the sheer joy and power and learning and creativity that comes from collaborative work using social software in a world of sharply declining computing, communications and storage costs.

Thanks Joi for a wonderful random walk. By the way, it’s what I do with people I link to. It is worth actually taking a walk and visiting the site every now and then, rather than just getting syndicated and alerted content.

……….Yes we speak of things that matter. With words that must be said……………..

While working on the implications of better tagging and better learning (as part of syndication and search) I recently visited Rashmi Sinha’s site (as recommended by Chris Messina whom I found via Tara Hunt who was RageBoyed my way). Very interesting post on collaborative filtering and tags, something that everyone interested in that space should read. IMO anyway.

I particularly like the point being made about user-generated content being the key, the trigger. I quote from Rashmi:

But I think I do finally understand why collaborative filtering is being dragged out of closets, dusted and prettied up in this new world of tags, Web 2.0 and Long Tail. One of the roadblocks to collaborative filtering is user input, some expression of interest by a user that you can hook into. Tags provide such a hook. On the other hand, tags desperately need good ways of supporting findability. As I argued before, you can go only so far with lists. Which is why we are seeing interests in clusters, facets and collaborative filtering. Additionally, both tags and collaborative filtering provide inroads into the Long Tail.

I’m going to spend some time thinking about what she’s written, it takes some digesting. But I cannot help but feel this is important in the context of Four Pillars. Where collaborative filtering meets tags is where I can see the Bond Driver and the Learn Driver begin to do different things. [For those who have not read my earlier posts, this is a reference to the Nohria and Lawrence Four Driver model]

Thanks to Steven Johnson for pointing out Daring Fireball’s post on this.

There are a zillion analysts out there telling me what Boot Camp means and why.

And most of them, in the end, tell me why they think Steve Jobs has got it wrong again.

But not John Gruber, the person behind DaringFireball. His analysis is the first that makes sense to me, that puts forward a hypothesis that I can understand. And even better, he pointed me at Gavin Shearer’s post and to Chris Clark’s.

For those who don’t want to bother reading all the links, here’s the summary:

• Boot Camp is not an Apple versus Microsoft play. Today.
• It allows the high-end techies that swear by Apple to have access to Windows on an oh-well-if-they-must basis.
• That alone makes it worth it, if it means taking even one percentage point off Windows’ share.
• But it’s more beautiful than that. Given the Intel move, first off it allows Apple to jump in on the high-end PC market big time. This is a hardware play.
• It gets better. What Leopard (or possibly its successor) will do is ring-fence Vista within an OSX environment…and do so not in dual-boot mode but as quality virtualisation. This is an everything play.
  

I buy these arguments in principle. The plan for Intel followed by BootCamp followed by Leopard and by virtualisation-meeting-coolth makes sense to me. I can even see XBox beginning to sweat a little.
The bit I’m adding?

This is all about Jobs taking the iPod halo into the enterprise.

Tomorrow’s enterprise.

Staffed by tomorrow’s people. Generation M.

You see, they’re too young to know that nobody got fired for buying Microsoft. Far too young to know that nobody got fired for buying IBM. Guess what they’re going to buy if son-of-Leopard is around?

I was reading Clarence Fisher’s excellent post on open content and open learning, itself drawing from a fascinating symposium at MIT.

I quote from Clarence’s post:

“Importantly, many of these games remain popular mainly because of user generated content. These games ship with tools allowing the people who purchase them to create their own virtual worlds, their own stuff. The game makers have not locked them down, but instead, many of them take the exact opposite tack, depending on the community that grows around the game to create new content to keep the games interesting and demanding. This will often drive games into spaces where the original designers never intended.”

And this made me think. Nohria and Lawrence, in their four-drive framework in Driven, define the drivers as Acquire Learn Bond Defend.

And (as I am wont to do) I found the Cluetrain Refrain running through my head. Markets are conversations.

What’s an MMOG? A market, a conversation, where people acquire things and bond while playing, maybe do a bit of learning and defending as well.

What’s Betfair? (Although here I am treading into Park Paradigm territory) A market, a conversation, where people acquire things and defend things.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that every web co-creation experience I see, from Google and Amazon and eBay through to Yahoo and Flickr and last.fm, every one of these is a conversation that satisfies two or more of the drivers.

And then, as I moved again from Cluetrain to Driven, I realised that most of these sites/businesses tended to overlook the same driver. The Learn driver.

Because I cannot help feel that the first people who can really crack a Four Driver model for a business will win. Big.

And if I really feel that this is true, why am I telling everyone? Why am I not keeping it to myself and trying to “monetise” it some way? I’ll tell you why. Because thinking that way keeps patent clerks and lawyers busy, and destroys innovation.

So I’m going to keep reading Clarence. And people like him. To see how the Learn is brought into play. To see Driven become part of Cluetrain.