Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder

Leonard Cohen, Famous Blue Raincoat, 1971

It was an itsy-bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini

That she wore for the first time today

Brian Hyland, Itsy-Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini, 1960

Two songs from my childhood, both immensely memorable. One a novelty song that charted its way to the top, the other a haunting, lilting melody. Guess which one I had to learn to dance to at the age of 14? [I'll have you know that dancing to Leonard Cohen is no laughing matter!].

So what are these songs doing in “a blog about information”?

Let me try and explain. Famous blue raincoat. [Incidentally, it was a Burberry]. Not blue famous raincoat. Itsy-bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini, not polka dot yellow itsy-bitsy teeny weeny bikini.

Why?

Because the other forms just don’t sound right, don’t feel right, there’s something you can’t quite put your finger on why, but they’re not right.

Because adjectives have an order, a hierarchy; an order that is tacitly understood, learnt and practised by native English speakers; an order that has to be explained explicitly to non-native speakers of the language.

An order that goes something like this:

Quantity. Opinion. Size. Age. Shape. Colour. Origin. Material. Purpose.

Visit this site to see how non-natives get to learn the order and hierarchy. You may also find it of interest to read these posts on the subject. Other languages appear to be less hierarchical when it comes to adjective placement and order. [If you're interested, you can even take a look at Dalcurian adjectives :-)]

I had three reasons to write this post:

One, having known about this for some time, and having been reminded of it regularly more recently, I wanted to share it with you, in case you were as interested in it as I was. English is a wonderful, living, just-slightly-insane language.

Two, I think it’s a great example of tacit knowledge, something we need to understand better as we move forward with the web. We know it, but don’t know we know it. We use it, without knowing we’re using it.

Three, I think it’s a great example of how the web works, allowing me to write a post like this, linking to stuff that lets you dig into it if you choose to.

Incidentally, when people come and argue with me about apps and HTML5, I’ve tended to use just one word in reply.

Links.

Digital divides come in many forms: between continents, between countries, within countries; between age groups, between genders, between professions. There are even digital divides between companies and customers, particularly if the company’s inclined to imitate a dinosaur [In which case the company will suffer the same fate as the dinosaur].

When I worked in regulated industries, particularly in finance and telecoms, I had at least one regular source of joy. And it was in meetings when we were considering doing something new. I would count the minutes before someone asked, very well-meaningly “Have you considered the compliance implications?” At which point everyone nodded sagely and went back into staring serenely into their coffee, secure in the knowledge that very little “new” was going to happen.

It never took long. Most of the time, the question had been asked before the ten-minute marker.

Legacies come with costs.

While working at Dresdner Kleinwort, sometime in 1998, I was asked to pop over to Warsaw for a couple of days in order to assess the “Year 2000 readiness” of a number of Polish banks; they were considering flotations and my role was to perform part of the due diligence.

It was a very quick trip, validating what I’d already found out. None of them had done any real preparation for the Year 2000.

They didn’t need to. They were so late to the table that they’d leapfrogged the problem.

It was something that really resonated with me, because of what I’d seen in Calcutta time and time again, yesterday’s pioneers leave amazing legacies…. with amazing costs to follow. Younger, later participants don’t face the same brownfield challenges.

At LIFT in Geneva this year, David Rowan gave an excellent talk on why Start-up Entrepreneurs should move to Africa; afterwards, I had the chance to talk to him briefly over dinner, and what he said resonated as well. As a result, I started looking more closely into how “wired” Africa was becoming. Here’s the current intra-Africa optical fibre network, courtesy the UbuntuNet Alliance:

David also sent me off to check out what was happening undersea. Here’s what is projected to happen by 2014, from Steve Song’s excellent ManyPossibilities blog:

Africa has already gotten itself a good reputation for pragmatic progress particularly from a communications viewpoint, with “guerrilla innovation” around wireless and mesh; the mobile story is also very strong.

When I wax lyrical about the Dark Continent, some people respond by trying to move the argument to India and China, wanting desperately to show me that the digital divide is present there. It used to take me three years to get a landline in the India I left in 1980. Today, I can get a mobile phone there faster than I can get one in the UK, with less paperwork, and at lower comparable cost.

When I quote stories like that one, I get dismissive shrugs and suggestions that the technology in question is usually dated and second-rate. Which is why I smiled when I saw the recent Apple results, where it turned out that over 20% of Apple’s iPhone business was in …. China.

Carlota Perez, one of my favourite authors and economists, is someone you absolutely must read. Her Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital is one of the few books I have read cover to cover over a dozen times. [One day I shall write a post about those books]. At the Triple Helix Conference in memory of Chris Freeman at Stanford last year (slides here), she summarised one of the key ideas of her book as “The shift from financial mania and collapse to Golden Ages occurs when enabled by regulation and policies  to shape and widen markets”.

Sometimes when I see what happens in that murky space where incumbents and regulators act as haruspices over the entrails of mummified intellectual property regimes, I start thinking wistfully of a different world. One where regulation and policy enables Golden Ages to occur, unhampered by the acts of erstwhile market participants.

Maybe that different world is already there in the West. Eastman Kodak, with a commanding position in the world of film, and with over 1000 digital photo patents, went into bankruptcy earlier this year. Polaroid, who defined a whole new world of “instant” photography, has been going bankrupt regularly and repeatedly since 2001, and finally sold off some of its core patents earlier this month.

Patents. Stocks of knowledge, as John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison would probably call them, in the context of their seminal The Big Shift.

And while all that was going on, a small, young company whose apparent raison d’etre was to make digital photographs a la Kodak look like they were taken on Polaroids, got bought by Facebook for a cool billion dollars.

Instagram understood flows. Understood the importance of cloud, mobile, social and open.

All this makes me think.

Maybe I should be telling my children and grandchildren(to-be, in case anyone was wondering) Go South Young Man/Woman/Child.

Maybe Africa is it. Maybe Africa will leapfrog everyone else in welcoming a Carlota Perez Golden Age, with everyone connected and empowered with compute and storage and bandwidth affordably and effectively; maybe this will happen because they have no legacy to hold them back in this context, no haruspices, no mummified anythings. Maybe Africa will gain from the scale that India and China generate, and put that scale to work before anyone else.

Incidentally, this is not the first time I’ve raised this idea. Read Why It’s Over if you want a slightly different context.

Today I learnt, via my Facebook feed, that “Apple’s Siri thinks the Nokia Lumia 900 is the best smartphone ever”

Okay, that got my attention. I read a little more, decided to look into some of the other posts, and found this:

So someone from Apple must have cottoned on to what’s happening. And made some changes. [Incidentally, there is a YouTube video of the original unchanged version here.]

Which made me wonder. Why did it even happen in the first place? How come Siri thought so?

So I looked lazily into Siri, trying to find out whatever I could about its information sources. How would Siri go about answering the question?

Which led me to this:

When I saw that something in my head went bing!

Hmmm.

I’ve yet to decide quite how to publish them. My inclination is to go for a variation of the now-classic free digital download/$25 hardback/$150 limited edition. But I haven’t decided.

As I said, the books are labours of love, I get immense enjoyment just tinkering with them. The one I am keenest to complete will probably have no market. It is an unusual genre. Science fiction management manga. I am so enjoying writing it. And thinking of how I would want it illustrated.

But leaving that one aside, I’ve tended to drip-feed the content of the rest into the market in many forms: sometimes as a blog post; sometimes as a long dinner conversation with the kind of friends one has long dinners with; and sometimes as talks I give to a variety of audiences.

One such talk is Thought For Food, looking at food and information as if they were one. Dave Morin suggested the title in 2005 when I first broached the topic with him, two decades after I started delving into the subject matter.

It so happened that I spoke about it while at a TED Salon in Austin this March, as part of SXSW. And the curators-that-be at TED decided to give it some more airplay.

So here it is, ladies and gentlemen, my first (and probably last) online TED talk. All 8 minutes of it. Let me know what you think.

There’s lots about Facebook I like.

When some people moved over to Google+, I did what most others did. Treated Google+ like a gym. Joined. Went there occasionally. And not much else.

I’ve marvelled at how Facebook makes a misstep, learns from it, adjusts and adapts in superfast time. I’ve waxed lyrical about how enterprises could learn from Facebook.

I’ve been frustrated by shenanigans to do with Friendfeed and with Instagram, especially when things haven’t quite worked the way I expected them to work. I’ve been discomfited by the way my blog content suddenly “lived” in more than one place, with comments and conversations fragmenting. Little niggles here and there. But not enough to worry me.

You could say I’ve been a Facebook fanboy.

And then yesterday I learnt something that made me go Hmmm.

This.

Hmmm.

Here’s the story. Some days ago, I happened across some delightful reviews of a product in Amazon, a whole new genre of writing that I’ve been aware of for some years, but only followed seriously since Three Wolf Moon. I enjoyed reading what was written in the reviews of what appeared to be a very expensive audio cable. And, as you would expect, I shared it with my friends. In Facebook. And Twitter. And even Google+.

And that was that.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday, a friend of mine, someone I’ve known for thirty years, got in touch and pointed out that my act of sharing was now part of a “sponsored” something or the other, as shown above.

And that makes me go Hmmm.

There’s something I really don’t like about it.

When I share things, I share because I feel like sharing. Not promoted or sponsored or anything like that. Nobody pays me to write what I write, or to share what I share. Occasionally I write something that touches on Salesforce.com, where I work. Work is part of my life, so why ever not? And whenever there is any risk of people misconstruing what I write, I make sure the relationship is made very clear. I write about work the way I write about music or about food or about anything else that forms part of my life.

I am not paid to share. And what I share I share because I feel like sharing it.

So when I see my name appear under the headline “Sponsored” it does not sit well with me.

Now, all of a sudden, I have to think about what’s happening in a different light. Where and how did I give Facebook the right to use something I shared and embed it in a sponsored link? Perhaps I did, buried deep in the terms and conditions. In this content I don’t care if I made my comment publicly (I did), what matters to me is that there is a perception that I was sponsored to say something. And that I am not happy about.

I have other questions now. Who else saw the sponsored link? Was it just made visible to my friends? Why was my act-of-sharing considered worth embedding in a sponsored link? Was it my perceived “influence”? I’m not exactly an A-lister. There are many more such questions.

The most intriguing one for me is “why”?

Did someone pay for that sponsored link? Why on earth would they pay? What I’d shared was really satire, complete and absolute corruption of the review process in Amazon, but a corruption I admire and enjoy. Nobody is going to pay thousands of dollars for an audio cable after reading what I’ve said. It’s not that type of review, it’s not that type of product. For all I know the product may not even be for sale.

I have this faint and lingering thought that the whole thing is some sort of Kevin Slavin algorithms-gone-mad situation. That nobody actually paid for the sponsored link (there was nothing to gain), that somewhere deep inside the denizens of Facebook people are experimenting with new revenue streams that allow advertisers to pick recommendations up from shared activity streams and use them as they see fit. That the requisite permision structures are still being built. That somehow something “escaped” into the blue yonder.

Am I being too charitable? You tell me.

I don’t have any answers. I’m still not “against” Facebook, I’m not that kind of guy.

What I do have is this feeling of Hmmm. And a wish to know more about what really happened before I decide to do something about it.

How can I be sure that a photograph hadn’t been indexed yet? Well, one way to be sure is to know the provenance of the object. Who took it. When and where. And where it has lain dormant since.

Here’s one such photograph. I took it. And it’s been uploaded nowhere. And I have removed most signs of things/people who could give you a hint as to who the person is. There is still a residual hint in that I have met this person. And he is someone I respect greatly. Greatly.

So who is he? Whom am I with here below, with the background excised? Usual rules, first to get it right gets into the annual league table.

And here it is:

What are these?

So here goes. Today’s question is simple. Who is this?

If this becomes popular then I’ll publish a list of “winners” at the end of every month, along with a year-to-date table. First correct answer via comment here on this blog, on facebook, on twitter or on Google+.

Yet so much has changed, and changed irrevocably.

I thought I’d try and summarise the changes in a small number of word dichotomies, just to see how they would play out. Depending on the comments I receive, I can always extend the list and, where required, expand on the explanations. So here are the first three:

AND not OR

Channel-like choices are about mutual exclusion. You can choose BBC or ITV. An MP3 file or a CD. A digital download or a DVD. A “pirate” copy or a “legal” copy. Mobile or fixed. Wireless or cellular. A or B. One or the other. Sometimes the choices are binary, sometimes there are a series of choices. But one way or the other, the product and hierarchy mindset tends to think about mutual exclusion.

Customers don’t think that way. Why would they? Mutual exclusion constrains their ability to derive value. Customers prefer to think about AND rather than OR. Customers may listen to an “illegal” download and then go buy the original. Start a conversation via SMS and pick up the phone and talk part way through the conversation. Invite someone to join in, then carry on after they leave. Have LPs, tapes, CDs and MP3s of songs, listening to the highest quality version that’s convenient to listen to at the time. Analog and digital, instant and delayed, original and copy, these dichotomies can be played out in the context of price, often as part of a spectrum. But that does not make them mutually exclusive.

AND not OR is about understanding abundances and scarcities. People listen to their free CD of Prince AND pay handsomely to see him perform in person. Digital copies of Prince’s music are abundant. But there’s only one Prince.

BECAUSE not WITH

Doc Searls has written about this many times, as have I: we call this the Because Effect. When you deal with things that are scarce, you can make money with those things. Scarcity has value. If you have the only Penny Blue you can command your price. But scarcity is not the only way to make money. You can make money out of abundance as well. Linux is abundant. IBM used to make money with its operating systems. Then, when Linux came along, IBM saw a way of making money because of Linux rather than with it. There are many bloggers I know who don’t charge for their blog or allow any advertising. They don’t make any money with their blog. But they still make money because of their blogs.

BECAUSE not WITH is also about understanding abundances and scarcities.

WE not ME

George Bernard Shaw said something along the lines of “If I have an apple and I give you that apple, then you have an apple and I don’t have an apple. But if I had an idea and I give you that idea, then we both have that idea”. Information, and information-like digital goods, are often “extreme nonrival goods” in economic terms. When they are replicated and shared, they are able to be enjoyed by all and sundry. Over the last few decades, many of the things we’re involved with have become standardised and expressible in mathematical terms. Many financial instruments have become dematerialised; compute and storage power have both become virtualised; personal genomes have been modelled sufficiently and can now be sequenced and analysed, allowing us to model personalised medical treatment based around the individual genotype.

When something can be expressed mathematically, the ability to model it increases dramatically, as is the ability to simulate it. As we learn more about the world we live in, as we learn more about ourselves, we’re able to form better abstractions about our environment and our engagement with that environment. As we form better abstractions we’re able to develop standard ways of looking at things, of expressing things. As we develop those standards we’re able to model and simulate aspects of ourselves and of the world around us.

This has significant implications for us in terms of what we can achieve in health, in welfare, in education, in government.

But it needs us to share. It needs us to start each of these processes thinking open rather than closed, abundant rather than scarce, public rather than private. Shared rather than exclusive. WE not ME.

WE not ME is also about our understanding abundance and scarcity.

AND not OR. BECAUSE not WITH. WE not ME. These may seem trivial discussions at present, but in time to come they’re going to form the core of some very serious discussions; so far, the creation of artificial barriers around extreme nonrival goods has been about the amount of money people stand to make as a result of the barriers.

Soon, it will be about the number of people who live. Or die. Because the ideas will relate to how people can replicate medicines cheaply and efficiently; get access to drinking water safely and securely; grow sufficient food affordably and sustainably.

Humanity is about life and death. It is up to us to make sure it is not about life or death.