Author: JP

Applying judo techniques to piracy

These are historic times, and the events of this particular “first Tuesday after the first Monday in November in a leap year” overshadowed everything else. There is change afoot, and powerful change. Despite all the hype, and despite the predicted sheer scale of the victory, I was amazed. And Obama’s acceptance speech was something else.

I was so taken up with the election that I missed this story:

MySpace and MTV plan to make money from pirates

Simply put, MySpace and MTV will convert the pirated material into vehicles for ads and into ads for the original material.

The logic appears to be something like this. Analyse material to confirm what it is and whether it has been pirated. If it has been pirated, then inject relevant ads into it along with links that connect to the original material.

In effect, use the power of the pirate to spread your business. And thereby fight piracy.

And that made me think. Why get so convoluted? Instead of doing away with pirates, why not do away with piracy? Digital material is intrinsically abundant; to do away with piracy, all that is needed is the removal of artificial scarcity. Then nothing is considered piracy. And everyone who wants to can become a distributor of ads or other services.

There is often some digital material at the heart of every social object. Social objects circulate, they pass from hand to hand. They can pass freely and without encumbrance, without let or hindrance. If they are allowed to.

Social objects get enriched as they move around, enriched with new information. This includes recommendations, the things that ads become when they grow up. If they grow up.

Maybe it is time to stop doing away with pirates and to start doing away with piracy. And to understand the power of social objects in that process.

Thinking about why I love poetry

There are many things I am grateful for, many people I am grateful to. I have been blessed in many ways.

One of the people I am grateful to is my father. And one of the things I am grateful to him for is the effort he made to ensure I had a love of poetry.

You see, I don’t remember him making any effort at all. Just conversation. He would quote snatches of poetry at random, leaving me with the (completely voluntary) task of looking the quotation up in Bartlett’s or in Stevenson’s, and following it up where appropriate with delving into relevant anthologies or collections.

He was aided and abetted in this by my uncle PK, whose style was completely different, larger than life in every way. Instead of the odd couplet or verse, PK would burst forth into song, an entire poem at a time, delivered as only he could. To this day I have not heard an Indian recite Burns the way he did; in fact I have not heard anyone visibly relish the act of spouting poetry as much as he did.

It’s only now that I realise what a privileged upbringing that was, to be in a household where Shakespeare was quoted daily, not just from the plays but from what the onlie begetter actually got; where hearing Herrick or Wordsworth or Tennyson or Browning or Dickinson or Coleridge or Dylan Thomas was considered normal; where the War Poets were loudly discussed over coffee and cigarettes, where Yeats was celebrated as joyously as Wodehouse. PG, despite not being a poet, was quoted at home regularly, interspersed with Carroll and Lear. And Ogden Nash. Besides Wodehouse, the only author I remember being quoted regularly was Rex Stout.

The teachers at school therefore had something to work with, particularly the brothers Vianna, Mr Redden and Mr Engineer. They taught us well.

And all this was overlaid with occasional references to poetry embedded in the Times crosswords and in the quiz leagues that formed an exhilarating part of my youth and adolescence. Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon and John Lennon had their considerable influence as well, as did Bertie da Silva, a close friend and constant companion in my university years.

All this is why, today, I can spend time reading and enjoying the poetry of someone like Nick Laird. A complex and sometimes confusing array of influences conspiring to encourage the love of poetry in me.

I was delighted to see Use of Spies in the October issue of the Believer, there’s something about that poem I love. Can’t explain why, but I do.

Here’s an MP3 of Nick reciting the poem, in case you’re interested.

By the time I retire (which is now a handful of years away) I will have been involved in building a school. Of that I am certain. And every school day, I hope to walk to that school and spend an hour or two just talking to children about my love of words and language and poetry, showing them that love in conversation and anecdote and story.

Freewheeling about visualisation

A number of people brought this site, SayHear, to my attention at the weekend. Go take a look at it, and, especially if you’re reading this in the US, go further. Call the appropriate number and tell people why you’re going to vote for your selection.

So what is the site about? Well, you choose a number to ring based on your voting intention, then leave a message explaining why. You could indicate your intention not to vote as well. The colours of the box represent the voting intention. The information in the box represented where you were calling from. And the information “under” the box stored your voice message for others to click on and replay. Simple yet powerful.

What I particularly liked about the site was the simplicity of the idea and of the visualisation. Rich information, presented in a manner that made consumption of that information intuitive and easy. Colour codes that were consistent with external “standards”. Metadata, the area codes, also consistent with external standards. Information in text form enriched by the embedding of another form of information, that of the “voice file” at each point.

Many possibilities open up. For example, you could take “incoming calls” and represent the options the caller chose by using colour and size and shape, build a variant on a tag cloud. You could choose some other way of displaying call duration. You could associate the “box” so created not just with the speech file, but also the transcript. The capacity to use visualisation to reduce firehoses of information into manageable streams, that capacity has been around for a long time. What is new is the ability to mix and match different types of information while doing that. What is new is the platform used to deliver it.

[Note: I’m biased. The guys who designed and delivered this, Gershoni and Some Random Dude, are completely unknown to me. But the platform they used, Ribbit, is very much known to me. BT bought the company a few months ago, and I have the privilege of serving as its chairman.]

In a networked world, open innovation thrives when open platforms exist. What you see above is the shape of things to come. To echo the words of David Weinberger, small pieces loosely joined, joined to create value that could not have been created any other way.

Bonus link: I found this site an interesting read, both from a visualisation perspective as well as from the viewpoint of education in general.

When you see a fork in the road, take it

That’s my second-favourite Yogi Berra quotation; the number one slot is reserved for “Nobody goes there any more. It’s too crowded.”

Some of us see forks and wonder which road to take.  Others see a single road.

That’s a point made very well by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser in Born Digital: Understanding the first generation of Digital Natives

It’s an entertaining yet serious book, a must-read for anyone interested in Generation M, the first generation of digital natives. [And as far as I can see, that includes everybody. Who wouldn’t be interested in understanding Generation M? Who can afford not to?]

I’m not going to spoil it for you by even trying to summarise it here. Instead, here’s a taster of the kind of issues covered:

  • Generations like mine view the digital world as distinct and separate from the analog world. Those that are born digital don’t know the difference, they live integrated hybrid lives.
  • It’s not just technology that’s changing, the more important changes are in culture and values. Unless we understand the value sets and perceptions of the coming generation, we’re not going to have any idea how to proceed.
  • This understanding is critical to a number of decisions facing us now and in the near future, about identity, privacy and confidentiality, intellectual property, the very internet itself. We face these decisions as individuals, parents and teachers, firms, even governments. We face these decisions in policy making, in regulation, in legislation, both locally as well as globally.
  • The consequences of getting these decisions wrong are significant. It’s not just about throwing away value, not just about wasting or delaying potential. It’s about losing touch with a generation that mankind can ill afford to ignore.
  • The issue of the digital divide is also not going to go away. So when we work on these solutions, we need to keep making sure that the inclusiveness is protected, the inclusiveness that is an integral part of the digital native value set.
  • Time is not on our side. The pace of change is escalating, and escalating fast. We need to prepare for action, informed action. The book helps us do that.

These issues are discussed in depth, fairly and objectively. Importantly, they are discussed from a standpoint of evidence rather than pure theory. The book also does all of us a big favour by having a comprehensive bibliography.

There are going to be a lot of books about the digital natives; books from a variety of perspectives, written in a variety of styles, written to a variety of standards. What Born Digital does is to provide us a benchmark, a yardstick, a reference point for all that follows.

My thanks to the authors.