Author: JP

The rise of the creator class

I was very taken by the launch of SoundIndex from the BBC, which came to my attention today. Why? Take a look at this partial screenshot:

The chart by itself is not particularly remarkable. Not until you take a look at the rubric for the colours under each track, shown as the Power Bar Key.

A good piece of visualisation, I hear you say. Maybe that’s not particularly remarkable either. Not until you take a look at some of the possible implications on distribution models, from a recent Wired article by David Byrne (yes, the Talking Head).

All of which leads to this, also from the same article, well worth a read:

The times, they aren’t a-changing any more. They have changed. It is no longer possible to sustain a situation where overheads and marketing costs take more than half the money from the sale of a CD. The iTunes approach is not necessarily sustainable either, as Byrne points out.


For many years, I have had to put up with the phrase “content is king”, a phrase I personally find irritating, abhorrent, to be classed with words like “audience”. Looking back, I now realise why content was king. Because we’d managed to drive a wedge between creators and their creations.

It’s not going to be that easy any more, separating the creator from her creation.

I think this wedge may have been meaningful in the days of atoms, when copying the creations was not a trivial task, when distribution was valued and had high barriers to entry. Now all that changes, with the internet becoming that great big copier in the cloud, as Kevin Kelly stated so eloquently in Better Than Free.

For a long time now, I’ve been insisting that Jerry Garcia was the father of opensource (as evinced by the Grateful Dead’s enlightened attitude towards taping rows at concerts) allowing . Now maybe that’s coming round full circle. Now maybe it’s time for musicians to take a leaf out of opensource. Maybe we’re going to see more and more of some variant of Creative Commons, where the music is free as long as you don’t make commercial use of it, with all rights belonging to the artist.

When commercial use is made, the artist gets paid. While continuing to retain all rights.

The artist is in control.

Just musing on a Saturday night.

Indulge me…

…while I play around with themes for the blog. Apologies for disturbing your reading. I thought it was time for a new look, and I’m trying to do this all via WordPress for the first time. So far so good.

Thinking more about Facebook and social networks and e-mail

Whenever I get the chance, I talk to people about just how they use Facebook as part of their day-to-day business. Today it was my sister Jayapriya’s turn. She runs a literary agency out of India and China and Singapore and a few other places, and was in town for the book far.

She described how she meets publishers, converses with them, forwards manuscripts where relevant and completes contractual negotiations, all on Facebook.

And something about the way she said all this made me realise something for the first time. It’s pretty obvious. It’s very obvious. But I missed it. Completely.

And that is this:

When people converse on Facebook, they connect with each other. Not with intermediaries. No PAs or EAs or ESs or whatever.

Up till now, enterprise mail has always been all about mailing lists and distribution lists and blind copies and carbon copies. As it matured, enterprise mail became all about Office attachments, particularly spreadsheets and presentations and documents. 

And I hated it. So not fit for purpose. [Or, to put it another way: Fit for a purpose I wanted no part of: Fit mainly for office politics and intrigue].

A few weeks ago, I mused about the lack of a Forward button on Facebook, and how refreshing that was. The implications of not having a cc button or bc button  or Office attachments. The implications of having Record Video and Share Link and Add Music/Video.

But I missed this key difference. The disintermediation of the enterprise protective barrier. I need to think about it some more, try and see just how people work differently as a result.

What I see so far is intriguing. I see that Facebook mail is all about between-enterprises rather than within-the-enterprise. Between-enterprise mail is largely about business and rarely about politics. Within-enterprise mail is often about politics. 

I wonder. Comments anyone. Stowe, your input will be appreciated, given your unrequited and yearning love for e-mail.

Of parasites and pests ….. and regulators?

A couple of days ago I read a headline in the Financial Times (strange, the things I get up to on vacation!):

Airlines and their regulator too “collaborative” says watchdog

You can find the article here. [For some reason, the headline in the print copy is not the headline in the linked article, but the change of headline is not germane to this post.]

The juxtaposition of the airline, regulator and watchdog took me on one of my traditional flights of fancy, and I thought I’d share it with you, and learn from your comments and links.

Many years ago, I worked at Silwood Park, an Imperial College research campus near Ascot, Berkshire. I used to travel in on the White Bus from Windsor (where I still live), serenely passing through the Great Park against the grain of the traffic before getting off the bus approaching Sunninghill.

Most of the passengers were regulars, as was Alan, the pipe-smoking genial driver. [I still see Alan in WIndsor every now and then, though he’s retired now]. Most of the passengers were forty years older than me, going about their morning errands and chores, shaven, shorn and dressed for the day; theirs was a generation of immense discipline and courage, and it showed in their retirement.

There was only one other passenger anywhere near my age, long-haired, bejeaned and Jesus-bearded. I cannot recall his name (this was over 20 years ago) but I do recall what he said he did.

And what he did was this: Using formal research methods, he sought to identify the parasite and the pest that went with a particular plant. Apparently, as human migration continued through the ages, we took our plants with us. And, usually accidentally, we took the related pest or parasite as well.

But rarely both. Since we didn’t know what we were doing, we tended to take plant+pest or plant+parasite, all by happenstance, and as a result the plant turned out to be unstable in the ecosystem it was transplanted into.

So this guy, and his colleagues, spent all their time trying to locate the precise pest or parasite that had been “disembarked”, with a view to repairing the ecosystem imbalance.

I found all this fascinating, and have spent time reading up on the different forms of symbiosis as a result, seeking to understand the difference between pests and parasites and their relationships and interactions with the “host”.

Maybe it’s the heat, maybe it’s because I’m on vacation, but the first thing that occurred to me when I saw the “…regulator too collaborative…” headline was: plant: parasite: pest.

We have much we can learn from biology, but until now I did not consider regulatory models to be part of that set. Now, having considered this for a few days, I am intrigued.

Can we come up with a market model where participants are “hosts”, regulators are “parasites” and watchdogs are “pests”? Can we learn to model these things objectively, without reacting to negative connotations of the terms themselves?

Well, aqualung, (since you tweeted the question) that’s what I’ve been thinking about. How to create a better model for market regulation, one that creates a balanced ecosystem. How to learn from nature in doing this, in conceptualising it.

I won’t bore you guys with the rest, I’ve been working on quite an elaborate model: what I will say is that there is scope to build out many related concepts: the obligate relationship between the host and the parasite, the lack of an obligate relationship between the host and the pest; how the pest keeps parasite numbers down; how the parasite protects the plant from the pest.

Just the kind of stuff I like thinking about on vacation.

Comments welcome.

Musing lazily about visualisation

I guess most of you have seen this by now, it’s been doing the rounds these past few days. (My apologies, I can’t actually remember where I first saw it and saved the diagram. When I remember I will make sure I give credit appropriately.):

 

It reminded me of the Indexed blog, where Jessica Hagy has been entertaining us with wonderful charts for some time now. Here’s an example:

By the way, her book’s pretty good as well. She has a searing wit about her, she touches many diverse subjects, and she does a great job showing how charts can be used to actually convey information. Strongly recommended. 

We have so much to learn about visualisation.