Month: January 2009

of mangoes and moustaches and design

I love mangoes. So much so that I eat them in every possible form: the normal fruit, the dried fruit, the pickle, the juice, ice cream, sorbet, whatever. Even in joke form. Mangoes in to a bar.

Talking about mangoes and bars, take a look at this:

What a wonderful idea. A fork with an extra-long central tine, so that you can “spear” the mango all the way to the seed, so that you can peel off the skin and eat the mango lollipop style. Mango forks have been around for quite some time, as you can see below:


If you want to know more about mango forks, you need to read Maura Graber’s forthcoming book, Let Them Eat Cake.

While I was wandering around her site, I was reminded of another piece of wonderful Victorian utensil invention, the moustache spoon. So here’s one:

Don’t you just love it when people design useful things?

Musing about lifestreaming and learning

I saw this today:

The Feltron Report. Nick Felton’s report on his activities during 2008.

Absolutely fascinating. As the cost of such data acquisition drops, and as the cost of storing such data drops as well, the possibilities are tremendous.

From an enterprise perspective, what the report represents is a part of the future of two things: CVs and appraisals. Nick’s work reminds us that you can now tell a story about what you did in ways you could never have done before. As with anything else, there are opportunities to game the “system”, but that is not what I want to concentrate on. I want to look at the positive benefits of having such facilities, my world is littered with half-full glasses and half-open doors.

Why am I excited about this?

Firstly, because of the importance of feedback loops. Because feedback loops of this sort are valuable as learning tools. As I learn more about what I really did with my time, I learn more about what I would like to change in that context; the feedback loop of “actuals” helps me do that. As I learn more about what I liked and what I disliked, I learn more about how I can keep doing the things I like doing; collaborative filtering helps me do that. As I learn more about what others perceive as things I did well and did badly, I learn more about how I can improve my strengths as well as my weaknesses; the feedback loop of “reviews” helps me do that.

Secondly, because of the value of “independent” low-cost data collection in this context. Writing down every song I listen to, and writing down all the time I spend listening to music, is painful. But rating songs as I listen to them, and having something like last.fm do the aggregation of my listenstream, it takes that pain away. Now if activities at work could be aggregated in this way, people would think differently about time sheets. Today too much of what goes into a time sheet is a lie.

Thirdly, because of the ability to share the information so gained. In the past, whether it was a CV or a “performance review” or an “appraisal”, what went into the report was very subjective, very biased. As a result people didn’t like sharing the information with others. When the data is collected independently and objectively, this unwillingness to share goes away.

Finally, because of the value we can unlock in teaching. Take the enterprise context of “induction”. You know what I mean, that strange process when you try and explain what you do to someone completely new. When you can give someone a “Felton Report” for a particular role, there is so much rich information there. The report could be an exemplar’s actual report, it could be a synthetic report made up of a number of exemplars averaged out.

We can learn so much. About differences in locations and geographies and cultures.

I’ve kept my comments to the enterprise context, but actually they apply everywhere. Everywhere where people want to learn. Felton Reports will become valuable in the context of education everywhere.

Which is why I am not surprised that I learnt about their existence from glassbeed. [You’re a good man, Clarence Fisher.] I follow Clarence Fisher because he’s that rare breed, a teacher who really means to make use of modern technology in the classroom to the benefit of the people he teaches.

wondering about spam

I use Akismet, and as a result most of the spam directed towards my blog gets trapped. Some stuff does get through, and there’s something about the stuff that gets through that intrigues me. So I thought I’d share it and find out if anyone can shed light on the phenomenon.

A large percentage of the spam that does get through seems to be directed at a particular post, as shown below:

It’s an old post, nearly three years old. And it doesn’t read too well, the quotation marks have been replaced by hieroglyphics ever since I recovered the post from backup. But I can’t see anything unusual or different about the post, something strange that would attract spam. Yet maybe 70 per cent of the spam that makes it past Akismet is directed towards this post. Anyone know why? Anyone experience anything similar?

Down Memory Lane

I was going through a bunch of old papers and magazines, doing the therapeutic, cathartic clear-out thing. And I came across the September 27, 1999 issue of BusinessWeek where the first-ever E-BIZ 25 was announced. Heady days.

Anyway, here they are, unranked, grouped in 6 classes shown in brackets:

[empire builders]

  • Jeff Bezos, Amazon
  • Steve Case, AOL
  • Tim Koogle, Yahoo

[the innovators]

  • Louis Borders, Webvan
  • Jay Walker, Priceline
  • Meg Whitman, eBay
  • Glen Meakem, Freemarkets
  • James Clark, Mycfo
  • Christos Costakis, E*Trade

[bankrollers]

  • Masayoshi Son, Softbank
  • Robert Kagle, Benchmark
  • Lawton Fitt, Goldman Sachs
  • John Doerr, Kleiner Perkins
  • Bernard Arnault, LVMH Moet Hennessy

[the visionaries]

  • Mary Meeker, Morgan Stanley
  • John Hagel, Mckinsey
  • Bill Joy, Sun

[the architects]

  • Lou Gerstner, IBM
  • Pehong Chen, Broadvision
  • David Peterschmidt, Inktomi
  • Kevin O’Connor, DoubleClick
  • Ellen Hancock, Exodus

[the pacesetters]

  • David Pottruck, Charles Schwab
  • John Chambers, Cisco
  • Michael Dell, Dell

Seems like such a long time ago. Yet less than ten years have passed. No Google on the list. No Apple. So who would make your list today?

Of followers and followees and friends

Take a look at this study in the latest First Monday, on Twitter Under the Microscope. What it does is associate each Twitter user with three types of people: “followers” (people who “follow” the person), “followees” (people followed by the person, the declared friends) and “friends” (people who have received at least two @ messages from the person, the “hidden” friends).

Huberman et al come to a finding that’s not surprising: the driver of usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the “declared” set of friends and followers.

This by itself is not surprising: as the authors point out, every community, every social network, evinces a similar pattern. We send e-mail regularly to a very small portion of our address book; we call a very small portion of our mobile contacts; we reach out to a very small portion of our Facebook “friends”. This sort of behaviour is true even in other communities; for example, there are a number of opensource projects that behave similarly.

So why should Twitter be any different?

Let’s take a look at this diagram:

This would suggest that as the number of friends increases, there is apparently no loss in reciprocity. Yet, when you look at this diagram, there is a suggestion that the number of friends is constrained in Dunbar-like manner:

I’ve tended to believe that if anything, social software would help raise the Dunbar number. The studies above suggest this is not the case. But I’m still holding on to my hunch.

Why? Because I think we live in an age where there something wonderful happening, something that just has to affect the Dunbar number, something that is accentuated by social software.

Most people would agree that the development of language as a means of communication affected the Dunbar number, raised the Dunbar number.

Most people would agree that the evolution of language from oral to written cultures had a significant and positive effect on the number.

It is not difficult to make a case that there was further improvement when writing turned to printing (with an intermediate growth phase as scripts becames codices).

It is reasonable to suggest that when we got the world’s biggest copy machine (as Kevin Kelly called the internet) we would see another shift.

I think there is one more shift of significance. The ability to search and retrieve communications cheaply and quickly. Something that has just started happening.