Author: JP

Ruminating about costumes

As a family, we love fancy dress parties. My son’s at one right now; we go to at least one a year; if there isn’t one to go to, then we try and host one. I guess it’s something they put in the water where we live.

We like wacky themes. For example, when my wife turned forty, she chose the theme “Come as what you wanted to grow up to be when you were a child”. That led to some great entries, the winners being a couple in their twenties who came brilliantly “aged” as people in their 80s. When the theme was to “come as the opposite of you”, I went as a skinhead. Which was fine, up to a point. This was in the early 1980s, and most of the costume was easy to get hold of. I even managed to buy a plastic thingummybob to cover my hair, a skin-coloured skull-cap-like thing. But it was meant for someone whose skin colour was not my skin colour, and changing that was hard.

Most of the time, I try and go as a hippie; the family are used to it. I’m strange that way.

But I digress. Suffice it to say that we like dressing up in costumes.

Now as you know I come from India; when I first entered the West, I could not get over the kind of pampering that pets received, in terms of food and beds and toys and even shampoos. As a child I was told that the USA and the UK spent more on pet food than on aid, and I believed it. And since I’d been brought up to believe that a dollar of trade was worth a hundred dollars of aid, I was pretty relaxed about it.

Like most families with children, we’ve had canaries and budgies and hamsters and goldfish over the years. When it comes to serious pets, it’s been about cats; we have two great cats, Mudpie and Midnight, inherited from friends who’ve emigrated to the US, and a kitten, Tiger. Here’s a shot of the three of them quietly observing an interloper in the garden.

And here’s one of the kitten on his own. Sometimes he gets left out of things, because Mudpie and Midnight are sisters and they go back a long way. But he doesn’t let that get to him:

I hope by now to have established that (a) we love fancy dress as a family and (b) we’re used to pets. Yet nothing, absolutely nothing, prepared me for this, very topical, juxtaposition of the two:

What can I say? Politics makes strange bedfellows. Hat tip to Sarah J-L for the tweet that led me to the photo, which is to be found here.

Musing about Alliteration

When I was around ten years old, my father introduced me to this poem:

It was an inflection point for me. Until then, I had always thought of poets as creative people who expressed themselves in verse when caught by the muse; as artists who penned off heaps of poems in seconds flat as and when the mood took them. I had never considered the possibility that some poets worked at structure and tone and metre and scansion. A whole new world opened up for me, suddenly and with no warning, a world I liked as much as the world of “normal” poetry. I loved it, there was something satisfying in knowing that some poetry was worked on with perspiration rather than created by inspiration, without effort.

As a result of looking for the unusual in poetry, I found out more, not just about mnemonics and acrostics in verse, but also about satire. I learnt to enjoy Joyce Kilmer’s Trees (I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree/A tree whose hungry mouth is prest/Against the sweet earth’s flowing breast) while still being able to enjoy Ogden Nash’s variant Song of the Open Road (I think that I shall never see/A billboard lovely as a tree/Indeed, unless the billboards fall/I’ll never see a tree at all). Similarly, I could enjoy the Lewis Carroll Father William as much as the Robert Southey one. And all because my father introduced me to Alliteration, or the Siege of Belgrade. [At least that was how the AA Watts poem was taught to me].

Which brings me to this BBC article that told me about Christian Bok’s Eunoia. A book of five chapters, with each chapter dedicated to the use of one vowel and no more than one vowel. Gimmicky? Artificial? Yes, but so what? It’s the kind of offbeat thing I enjoy.

Incidentally, while looking for the Siege of Belgrade piece (which I found here, my thanks to Poet’s Corner), I also came across this offbeat site, Abecedaria, which introduced me to the delights of Tamil unicode. Now I must admit it never occurred to me to Google that.

The importance of publish-subscribe

Over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed that my reading has become more and more heterogeneous and spread out; there has been a perceptible shift away from an A-list approach to a Long Tail, avoiding the “hit culture” implied by A-list approaches.

During that same period, there have been a number of articles about the death of Facebook and, for that matter, the death of blogging. [An aside: When you’re in a position to select the metrics you can “prove” almost anything. I have seen so many business cases that beggar belief, so many presentations written ostensibly by Messrs Andersen and Grimm].

I think the exact opposite is happening, that blogging is becoming mainstream rather than dying. And the same with Facebook.

I have some views on the why, and would love to know what you think about it. So here goes:

There was a time when the barriers to entry to the world of publishing were high, very high. That led to a situation where people who wrote (and were published) belonged to an exclusive class. Then along came the web and the blogosphere, and the barriers began to come down. But not that much. Let’s say this was around 1999. Blogging was still something done by a small group of people with good connectivity and the skills to use relatively technical tools. Readership was based on word of mouse, and so things remained relatively cliquey.

As the barriers came down further, as tools became easier to use, there was a level of democratisation. By this time, let’s say it was around 2003, better tools were emerging, Technorati had a job to do, blogs were mushrooming. Access was still not that great, and people used to say that the blogosphere was an echo chamber. Terms like A-lister flew around; a small number of people even acted like A-listers.

And then we come to now. A blogosphere that is becoming mainstream and therefore getting written off, apparently. Wrong. Because what is happening is this.

First was word of mouse. Then we had the blogroll. That was followed by OPML files. Which in turn were succeeded by sharing feeds via aggregator/readers like Netvibes.

Access to the world of the participative blogger became easier every step of the way. The way I discovered new writers changed, the way I tended my list of people to read changed. Cliques and echo chambers were replaced by the Long Tail.

The word of mouse was by definition cliquey. When it was the blogroll you had to know about it before you used it. OPML was also a barrier to entry. Netvibes and its competitors made things easier.

But what really changed things was Facebook. And then Twitter. And now FriendFeed. Communities with very low barriers to entry that allowed people to share what they wrote.

Share, but not on a broadcast basis.

Share, on a publish-subscribe basis.

That power now runs through many things we do, and I don’t think we really understand what we have. It is powerful, it enriches, it enlivens, it democratises.

People will discover Twitter and Friendfeed and their successors in the same way as they discovered blogging. And when they do, when they see the power of pub-sub, the blogosphere will become even more mainstream. Because barriers to entry and access will continue to fall, the risk of cliquism will reduce, the cost of discovering who and what you like will become negligible, the tools to manage your reading will keep getting better. All enhanced by the power of pub-sub.

Choosing what you want on a granular basis. Selecting the capillaries you like and discarding the rest. Weeding your river of reading.

Wasilla’s all I saw: the ultimate Palin-drome

I blame Christopher Carfi for this post. It was he who tweeted:

Wasilla’s all I saw

If that was not enough, he went further: he called it a Palin-drome.

Which had me on the verge of snorting green tea out my nostrils in ways God never intended nostrils to be used. Thank you Chris.

You know something? I had absolutely no idea what the etymology for “palindrome” was, so I had to look it up. The -dromos was not the problem, but the palin- sure was. And guess what? Palin is Greek for “back”. Figures.

The wikipedia article does a reasonable job of describing pretty much everything you need to know about palindromes, so if you’re curious or bored go take a look here.

The article also mentions my favourite, apparently said of de Lesseps:

A man. A plan. A canal. Panama.

While on the subject of word games and puzzles, I belong to a generation where learning to type was a normal thing to do. And, particularly when one was young, it meant hammering away at holoalphabetic sentences, sentences that contain every letter in the alphabet.

The commonest one was “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” 35 letters. And that was beaten by “Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs”. 32 letters. Pretty good going, I thought, using 26 letters with only six duplicates, while still making sense.

Letter-crazy kids like me were naturally interested in being the first to get to the ultimate, a 26 letter holoalphabetic sentence.

Sadly, even before I entered my teens, it was done: CWM FJORD-BANK GLYPHS VEXT QUIZ. Translated as Drawings on a fjord bank in a valley confused the expert. Or so they tried to convince me. And they did, enough for me to stop trying.

Anyone got any better palindromes to share, discounting those already in Wikipedia? Anyone got any better holoalphabetic sentences to share? Do let me know.

Thinking lazily about reputation and relationships

A few days ago, @shannonpaul referred to something @kdpaine had said, discovered via @kanter. And it was this:

“the word “reputation” is so 1990. today it’s all about relationships”

Maybe it’s the Calcuttan in me, but I guess I’ve always thought that way. For me, it’s always been all about relationships. Relationship before conversation before transaction. But as the Cluetrain guys so elegantly pointed out, that sequence had been lost in the West, and society had become more about Transaction First, Conversation only if it is going to help Transaction, Relationship only if it is going to help Conversation (and therefore Transaction).

No surprise then that when Customer Relationship Management systems came out, they tended not to be about managing customer relationships, but about managing transactions and exploiting the customer. Because they were deeply rooted in Transaction First.

Back to reputation and relationships. Thinking about what K D Paine said, I began to realise that the very concept of reputation differed between East and West. How? In three simple ways:

In the East, reputation was an aggregate of onymous statements. When people spoke about someone’s reputation, they said “According to Bharat’s uncle he is a reliable guy”, and stuff like that. It was tangible and lucid and, most importantly, related to real statements by real people. As against this, reputation in the West appears to have decayed into a collection of amorphous sayings by faceless disembodied ghosts, unattributed yet always quoted.

In the East, reputation was primarily about the good in a person rather than the bad. Sure, there were bad things said about people, but that was not the norm. “He comes from a good family, I know his father”. “She was a very good child at school, I remember her well”. You can rely on them in a pinch, it’s something that village is known for”. In contrast, Western concepts of reputation seem more to be about the bad rather than the good. In the same way as people say “Bad news sells”, there seems to be a bias in what passes for reputation, a bias towards weaknesses and criticisms.

The third difference is tied to this concept of good and bad aspects of reputation. In the East all reputation is shareable and gets shared. In the West, there is a tendency to hold back on good reputation things and share bad reputation things.

A common example is that of credit ratings and related areas. Banks tend to be willing to share “black” information, information about default, very willingly, but are much less willing to share “white” information, information about positive creditworthiness. [Yes I am aware of the racial stereotyping implied in terms like black information and black markets. But you know what? I have a life to lead, and tend not to waste my time worrying about minutiae like that. The sky could fall on my head. I could slip and fall in the shower.]

I’ve always wondered why this is, why people here are more willing to share “bad” information rather than “good”. One possibility, something I am kicking around in my head, is that it’s related to scarcity economics.

People who have a scarcity mindset are into hoarding, into information asymmetry, into secrets, into making things scarce. It is rare that people say good things about others. So why pass it on? It could have value by continuing to be scarce. Trade on it, execute a “transaction”. After all, that’s what life is about….. for people with scarcity mindsets.

Relationships are about abundance, not scarcity. Provided they are nonhierarchical, of course. That’s what the people who discovered network effects understood, that relationships scale differently, create value differently. Reputation is deeply intertwined with relationship, reputation is an embodiment of what your relationships say about you. So reputations should also be about abundance, not scarcity. And can enjoy network effects as well.

In the past, even in the West, this so-called “Eastern” concept of reputation was understood. Relationships did come first, then conversation, then transaction. It has been lost. Over the last twenty years or so, it is being re-found.

More later.