Author: JP

The Shaping of Things to Come

It’s been a long day, coming at the end of a long week, tiring yet ultimately very fulfilling. I wanted something to read, something very special and very specific. Whatever I chose, it needed to meet the following criteria:

  • escapist and lighthearted yet not superficial and empty of meaning
  • easy on the brain, not a taxing read, yet stimulating and challenging
  • physically in the form of a book yet in essence a web creation

So I thought for a while and decided to go with another read (probably my fourth) of Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things, designed by Lorraine Wild.

I love the book, particularly the repeated theme that people and objects are deeply connected in successive technocultures. And I sat down to read it.

After a while I took a break, made myself a green tea and checked the web for messages. And then I thought to myself, it’s been a few years since the book’s been out, let me see what the reviews have been like.

And one of the places I went to was Amazon. Stuck somewhere deep down the page, I saw this:

It made me think, now that’s the shape of things to come.

You see, I’ve never liked the traditional direct marketing model, the idea of direct mail irks me. I cannot believe that people even consider operating models with such appallingly low hit rates. [In fact, in today’s day and age, I’m surprised that people don’t rise up and rebel at all the waste of paper and postage and time and attention involved in creating and strowing around the junk mail].

My irkedness dropped down a notch or two when Google came along; now, despite the fact that we’d somehow managed to pave the cowpaths, we’d migrated a crappy model, lock, stock and barrel into the new world, at least we’d done away with the waste of paper and ink and postage and the energy costs of physical delivery.

But I was still irked. I felt cheated that we lived with such abysmal click-through levels. Conversations about this with the inestimable Doc then led to my being taught the emergent basics of VRM “at the master’s feet”, as it were.

What do customers ultimately buy after viewing this item? 83% buy the item featured on this page.

That is, at least in part, what VRM is about. Letting customers review and recommend things and then connecting those reviews and recommendations to other customers who trust the reviewers and their recommendations. Making it easy for customers to share their intentions with others, to share their actions with others, to share their likes and their dislikes. Their way.

If we get VRM right, then 83% will be a low figure. Imagine the reduction of wastage that is implied in that statement.

There’s gold in them thar hills

Take a look at this. Man throws money into the air, wanted to “spread a little sunshine”. Blog post, quotes, video, the lot.

Every time we mention “citizen media”, we will keep hearing horror stories about unchecked facts, downright lies, superficial reporting, poor use of language, bias and corruption.

But it’s happening. And will continue to happen. Connected scale is a wonderful thing.

“It’s some guy in North Carolina singing your songs”

I just love this story. Tommy de Carlo, a 43 year old Home Depot credit manager in North Carolina, lifelong fan of Boston, is heartbroken when Brad Delp, the lead singer, committed suicide last year. So he sings his heart out on a bunch of tracks, uploads them to his MySpace page as “tribute”, and less than a year later, becomes the lead singer of the band.

I need stories like this, to keep reminding me of the importance of access, of the importance of DRM-free content, of the importance of what Doc’s son Allen called The World Live Web. [ To keep reminding me that what we are doing, what we are fighting for, is about our emerging culture as much as anything else, that we need to understand more and more about open and free while we do this; that open and free can go hand in hand with success, both business and personal.

Boston’s business wasn’t harmed by what Tommy did, was it?

But it could have been. By DRM, by lack of access, by many things.

Just a thought.

Wondering about damage and repair

Ever since I first heard Clay Shirky talk about the cost of damage and the cost of repair, I have been very taken with the idea. I believe he was talking about Wikipedia at the time. The more I think about it, anything that is a commons will have this tendency to retain and increase value, as long as the cost of repair is kept at least as low as the cost of damage.

I started kicking it around in other contexts and the answer seemed to come out the same. It made me understand more about urban graffiti and about vandalism. Then, more recently, I saw this article, about chewing gum. So it costs 3p to buy a piece of chewing gum and 10p to clean up after it.

And it made me think. Wouldn’t that look a little unfair to a non-chewer? The chewer gets the benefit, the manufacturer makes the profit, and the taxpayer foots the bill.

Maybe it’s time for some radical solutions. Maybe we could try something else. If a good for sale is capable of damaging “the commons” then maybe we should measure the cost of repairing that damage. If that cost exceeds the cost of damage, then we raise a tax on the good until the cost of damage is higher than the cost of repair. Half the tax is payable by the manufacturer, half by the consumer. The taxes so collected are then used to do the repairing.

Permanent marker pens.  Chewing gum. Maybe even anything that comes in packaging that people tend to throw away.

Just a thought.

Pre-release piracy: another appalling term

I’ve been following a perplexingly fascinating case for about a year or so; one of those cases where truth way beats fiction. Simply put, one of the biggest companies in the music business, Universal Music Group, was suing the delightfully-named Roast Beast Music Collectibles, or more specifically Troy Augusto, who trades as roastbeastmusic on eBay, for selling on promotional material.

Last week Judge James S Otero decided enough was enough, threw the case out, and cited the doctrine of first sale as the primary reason.

You can see some of the coverage here and here. The Electronic Frontier Foundation did a great job in publicising the case and fighting in Troy’s corner, here’s an excerpt of what they had to say.

I collect books, and have in my collection many review copies Not For Resale. A small number were actually sent to me, and most of the rest I bought at charity shops (I think they’re called thrifts in the US). Some were given to me by friends who had received them originally. It never occurred to me that someone could even conceive of a reason to claim that what I was doing was illegal. And it is not. Doctrine of first sale.

People have been selling and trading rarities such as promo goods for a very long time, so I tried to figure out why Universal was getting so excited about it. So I looked into it.

I should have known.

Pre-release piracy.

So let me understand this. Universal want to send pre-release promos to people. Why would they do that? So that they could get good reviews of the releases, I would guess. So they must know the people they send it to, at least professionally. But they don’t trust them. They think that the recipients of the promos are going to go into business making copies of the promos and then selling the copies on. So they need a law to protect them against that eventuality.

You know something? If I was one of those recipients of the promo, I would feel insulted and send it back. Maybe that’s what we now need to do, start a movement to get reviewers to send all promos back unheard

Pre-release promos are slow-burning examples of artificial scarcity; the scarcity is non-existent at the point of pre-release….. The promos take time to develop into valued items, time measured in multiple decades. As a result, no one has bothered to create the balancing artificial abundance. What Universal was trying to do was to create that scarcity at the point of pre-release. And they failed.