Month: September 2006

I need a bit of advice. I’d like to make my blog more accessible, easier to read, simpler to play with. There are a number of things I’m thinking about right now in this context, roughly listed below, in no particular order:

• Getting rid of the Categories bit on the sidebar, replacing it with a shorter list of tags
• Ensuring that those tags are the same as on my Technorati profile
• Reclassifying all my posts according to those tags
• Reclassifying my blogroll into some sort of grouped list
• Adding a CoComment-style feature, maybe CoComment itself
• Bringing LibraryThing back
• Adding a Where am I bit
• Making sure I have a Contact Me clearly visible
• Providing an excerpt for each post, and only making that excerpt visible
• Finding a way for people to be able to listen to my posts
• Finding a way for people to read my posts in other languages

Then I thought to myself, why am I trying to do this on my own? Why can’t I just ask you? What would you have me do in order to make this blog more useful to you? [And yes, “shut up and just go away is a perfectly valid answer”…]

There are also some things I have felt uneasy about doing, like adding a Digg facility. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know. But I’m wary of it, as wary of it as I am with putting advertising on the blog. Something inside me doesn’t like something about it, and I have to figure out why. Again, comments welcome.

So please talk to me. Let me know what I can do to make things better, easier, simpler. What I should stop doing. What I should start doing. I’m still experimenting, it’s barely six months since I started blogging externally. And I’d like to get better at it.

If you use the Comment route then others can see what you say, and that may trigger other thoughts and suggestions. But if you feel uncomfortable with that route, then by all means write to me. I can be found at [email protected]

Thanks a lot.

Some months ago I referred people to a document produced by the US Department of Defense on opensource.

The very existence of the document intrigued me, given its source. I guess I didn’t feel that an organisation like the DoD was likely to be open-minded about opensource. Shows how wrong I can be.

I said I was intrigued. And I began dreaming of what ifs.

What if I was trying to convince people of the value of social software, what kind of organisation would I like to see as a “poster child”? What kind of “reference site” would make people sit up and think “Hey, there’s something going on here, and we want some of it?”

And I thought to myself. We really need a poster child that fulfils the following characteristics:

• Very command-and-control, very hierarchical
• A global brand with high brand recognition amongst the Fortune/FTSE/DAX/CAC whatevers
• Known worldwide for its secretiveness and hush-hush-ness as well
• So silo-ed that its right hand really didn’t know what its left hand was doing
• In fact so silo-ed that it didn’t know there was a right hand and left hand, or wouldn’t admit to it
• A business that had a demonstrably high reliance on quality information
• Operating in multiple geographies, timezones, cultures and languages
• Wondering how to reinvent itself as the world seemed to change faster and faster

If we could find this elusive poster child, then we would all find it easier to demonstrate the value of social software to C-level executives in major organisations worldwide.

I told you I’d been dreaming.

Well, I stuck that dream in the back of my head. Filed under wait-and-see-because-truth-is-stranger-than-fiction.

Then, a few days ago, while walking around the blogosphere, following a trail laid by Mark Berthelemy, I found an interesting document. Not sure which of the people he links to mentioned it, but it was there somewhere. So thanks, Mark.

Maybe, maybe, we have the possibility of finding that elusive poster child. Just maybe.
Titled The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community, it is written by D. Calvin Andrus of the CIA.

CIA. Interesting. Let’s see how they do against my “poster child” checklist. Command and Control. Hierarchy. Global brand. Secretive. Business based on information. Global multicultural operation. Desperately needing to reinvent itself. Etc etc. Hmmmm.

It’s quite an interesting paper, particularly since it is written for an environment that could not be more hostile towards openness and collaboration, hostile by design and by nature.

The bibliography is also interesting; A reference to George W Bush is a sine qua non, so no surprise. I’d expect to see references to Claude Shannon and Alan Turing and Benoit Mandelbrot and Bob Metcalfe. Even Adam Smith. I’d only be mildly surprised to see Steven Johnson and Deborah Gordon, and only slightly more surprised to see Ward Cunningham – Bo Leuf and Larry Downes – Chunka Mui. But I wouldn’t expect such a document to refer to Jane Jacobs, what a delightful surprise.
Within the document (and I’ve only read the 30-page version) Calvin Andrus dismisses classical reorganisations as variants of Titanic deckchair rearranging; provides a reasonable summary of the critical success factors of complex adaptive systems, and even suggests a technology stack that has active feedback loops at the top of the stack…..
Some of it may seem Social Software 101, but do remember the audience it was written for. We are not in the business of preaching to the converted, but in converting those who can’t or won’t listen. I have definitely learnt from it, and a number of you may find it useful as well.
If the CIA, or for that matter any major grouping of intelligence services, can truly grasp the value of social software, then there is hope for all of us. I look forward to finding out more about this experiment, and will try and get in touch with the author.

If it is, then please see what you can do with this link. If you find yourself in a country that hasn’t shown up as a visitor to the page, go ahead and correct that.

Nothing serious, not a chain letter, no money involved. Just an idea of how things move around and how long they take.

Following my post on The Economist’s article on truthful inflight announcements, Peeter Marvet pointed me at this story in a Toronto blog. Fundamentally someone at the Economist wrote to a number of bloggers, inviting them to cover and “scoop” the story, as a seeded experiment.

Wow, I said to myself. This is what a connected world feels like. Not sure where Peeter is, my guess would be Estonia. He reads something in a Canadian blog about a magazine published in the UK experimenting with the blogosphere. Wow, I said to myself.
So I read Michael Seaton‘s post, and assumed that the “scoop” link sent to him would open up the DRMed story, so that I could share it with all of you.

Wrong.
I’m glad the Economist is experimenting; but there must be better ways of doing this. Why not just let a few trial stories go out there free-to-ether, stories they think are eminently linkable, and see what happens? See whether they get a spike in digital subscriptions correlated to the linkers’ locations. Whatever.

Update: Michael Seaton commented on this post, and has now provided the entire article on his blog. Thanks, Michael. And thank you again, Peeter. [BTW was I right? Is your blog written in Estonian?]
There is much to learn about all this. We need to move from Seeding-as-Marketing to Recommending-as-The-Only-Way.

Buyers will make their intentions known, either overtly or covertly; marketing has always been about reducing the buyer’s search costs and simplifying the decision to purchase. There is no better way of reducing buyer search costs other than recommendations from trusted networks. Independent trusted networks.

The independence is as important as the recommendation.

I’d never heard of Sharon Weinberger or of Jack Sarfatti until a few days ago, when Chris Locke pointed me at a microwar brewing in the wikipedia space. [Thanks, Chris!]

Sharon makes some interesting observations in a post headlined Jimmy versus Jack. Examples:

• Wikipedia is a great resource, but I have been even more fascinated by a model of dealing with knowledge that could dispense with the elitism inherent in peer review. Wikipedia’s open editing model sounds so wonderfully subversive. But now that Wikipedia has a dominant web presence, it’s finding that allowing the masses to have free reign over knowledge has its downsides.
• I have argued […….] that peer review, though an imperfect system, may be the best system we have for dealing with science–at least as it pertains to science funded by government. I’ve often doubted my own conviction about this argument, and had secretly hoped that Wikipedia offered some alternative–if not for funding science–then at least for propagating science that might be unfairly quashed by peer review.
• In the final analysis, my issue […..] isn’t even whether […..] belongs to […….], but who gets to determine that classification. Wikipedians, [……], Jimmy Wales, or perhaps peer review?
• I don’t have the answer, and neither does Wikipedia,……

My italics. My elisions. My emboldening. And, if necessary, my bad.
Peer reviews can often be like benchmarking. Everyone accepts the intrinsic value, and yet everyone tends to use the process only when they can be sure that the answer is one that suits them.

I’m interested in Sharon’s observation that there is an elitism inherent in peer reviewing, particularly in scientific academia. More than just interested, intrigued. I sense that all her statements are in the same ball-park as my concerns with gatekeepers.

Humour me as I go for a wander. Take the origin of the word “bankrupt”. Wikipedia has this to say:

• The word bankruptcy is formed from the ancient Latin bancus (a bench or table), and ruptus (broken). A “bank” originally referred to a bench, which the first bankers had in the public places, in markets, fairs, etc. on which they tolled their money, wrote their bills of exchange, etc. Hence, when a banker failed, he broke his bank, to advertise to the public that the person to whom the bank belonged was no longer in a condition to continue his business. As this practice was very frequent in Italy, it is said the term bankrupt is derived from the Italian banco rotto, broken bench (see e.g. Ponte Vecchio). Others rather choose to deduce the word from the French banque, table, and route, vestigium, trace, by metaphor from the sign left in the ground, of a table once fastened to it and now gone. On this principle they trace the origin of bankrupts from the ancient Roman mensarii or argentarii, who had their tabernae or mensae in certain public places; and who, when they fled, or made off with the money that had been entrusted to them, left only the sign or shadow of their former station behind them.

I’ve looked at the Shorter Oxford and at Skeat, and they both endorse what I have always thought. The term is understood to have derived from the Italian banca rotta around the middle of the 16th century. Which is consistent with imagery of the merchants of Lombardy breaking the moneychanging bench of one of their peers when he let them down, so that he could not transact any business in the marketplace.

Peer review. Of a sort. Peer-driven action as a result of some community value or more or principle being broken. [I don’t buy the argument, suggested in the Wikipedia entry, amongst others, that the failing banker broke his own bank.]

Let’s move from bankruptcy to Speakers Corner. While there may be many such instances, the one I am most familiar with is the one at Hyde Park.

The rules appear to be simple and consistent. Anyone is allowed to speak. But you cannot trash the monarchy or seek to overthrow the government. Apparently.

So you can speak about pretty much any subject you like. And there are no bouncers or gatekeepers about.  But there are regulars about. Regulars who listen to anyone and everyone, quick to heckle, quick to clap. Who are these regulars? In the context of the All Comers market, their peers.

Destruction of the tools of trade, as in the Lombardy bankrupts. Ejection from the place of trade, as in defenestration. Heckling and jeering, as at Speakers Corner. At some level of abstraction, I guess that even jury trials are a form of peer review.

All of them have their strengths and weaknesses. The bulk of the weakness comes from being able to game the system, which happens as soon as you introduce some formal selection process for the peers, or (much worse) some barriers to selection or entry.
Peer review processes work best when the peers are the men on the Clapham omnibus, or even with Twelve Angry Men.

But we need to keep the selection criteria for peers as open as possible, and the barriers to speaking/publishing/sharing as low as possible.

I need to understand more about how elitism comes into play in scientific reviews. Any offers out there?