Author: JP

I don’t know whether it’s driven by innate curiosity, or whether I’m just wired that way: I learn best by watching someone do something. And, because of that bias, I believe in using examples wherever possible, stories, analogies, screenshots, whatever. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a picture with a few supporting words could be worth ten thousand.

Most readers of this blog are by now well aware of Google Maps, of mashups, of Twitter, maybe even of Twittervision, some less than others. No matter. As long as you’re curious about what these terms mean, and, more importantly, what they can mean for you. How you can derive value from them, as a person, as an enterprise.

Well, thanks to Super Tuesday, here’s your chance. Go here and see what’s happening; if your timezone permits you, and if you’re interested, watch the activity from 8pm EST, as the polls close and the results start pouring in. It will give you an idea of three things:

The power of combination, of “mashing”: how “static” data (like a map) can be overlaid with “volatile” data (like conversations)
The power of context, of “enrichment” : how it is possible to take a “firehose” of information and break it down to capillary size, just by using tools that embed the information in context
The power of collaboration, of “many”: how individuals operating with modern tools can provide us with detailed information as it happens

Here’s a screenshot of what’s happening now, but to get the real value, take a look at the site after 8pm EST. An aside. Some people hold the opinion that CNN made its bones on Desert Storm. It may well be that Twitter makes its bones on this election. The tool could not have been timed better.

Now that the Super Bowl‘s over and done with, attention switches back to the 2008 Presidential election, particularly the caucuses and primaries due to be held tomorrow, on what is termed Super Tuesday.

After reading Seven Days in May when I was around 12, I decided to read everything that Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey had ever written. Which included a book called Convention, reading which spurred me to follow the US Presidential election quite closely ever since. I have no idea why, I guess there’s something about the byzantine process that makes me feel at home; somehow, it manages to leave the bureaucracy of the Empire, Raj and even Writers’ Building quaking in its wake.

[Incidentally, I love the Knebel quote in Wikipedia: “Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics“.]

In conversation a few days ago, someone asked me to explain what Super Tuesday was, and for that matter how the US President was elected. I wasn’t happy with my explanation, and decided I’d blog it; that way I learn by putting myself through the discipline of writing it down, I learn from my mistakes, I learn from your comments. And maybe some of you will learn something as well.

So here goes:

Elected by electoral college, not by popular vote 

The President of the United States of America is actually elected indirectly, via an electoral college, on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December. [Technically, if the electoral college does not produce a majority winner, with at least 270 votes, then the process passes to the House of Representatives who then vote to elect the President, but this is an arcane amendment].

As a result, what we know as Election Day, the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, is not actually the day on which the President is voted for. It is actually the day when the electoral college is elected. The votes of the electoral college, however, are normally already pledged by then, state by state, party by party, through a process of caucus and primary and national convention. [Again technically, the electors have no legal requirement to vote as directed in the caucus or primary. But they do].

It is therefore possible for a candidate to win “the popular vote” in the November election (where the presidential candidate names do appear on the ballot) while still losing the election proper (which is based on the pre-pledged voting intentions of the candidates gaining election to the college of electors). This has happened, even as recently as 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote, yet failed to get majority in the electoral college. John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B Hayes and Benjamin Harrison, like George W Bush, all became President while losing the popular vote.

Delegates selected for national convention by caucus or primary

The actual selection of the presidential candidate by a party takes place at that party’s national convention, usually held in the August preceding a presidential election. Caucuses are local meetings which select delegates to district meetings which select delegates to regional meetings which select delegates to state meetings which select delegates to the national convention. Primaries compress all this and select delegates to the national convention.

Both caucuses as well as primaries can be closed (only available to registered party members) or open to all. Both caucuses as well as primaries can pledge delegate votes on a proportional basis or on a winner-take-all basis. There is also a concept of a semi-closed primary, open but requiring prior registration.

National convention selects presidential candidates as well as party platform

The party’s candidates for the electoral college are already known by the time the national convention comes along, so the objective of the convention is simple: nominate candidates for president and vice-president, sort out the party platform, do the necessary rah-rah to unify the party: remember that the convention follows maybe 18 months of bitter fighting within the party, as candidates battle against each other.

So. Razzmatazz. Caucus or Primary. National Convention. Election of Electors. Election of President. And that’s it.

Please do tell me what I got wrong, so that I can understand the process better.

Yossi Vardi has been an inspiration to me for many years, and thanks to him, I was able to make DLD in Munich this year. [Thanks, Yossi]. Who else but Yossi would seek to prove, definitively, that snails dragging CDs or DVDs could outstrip ADSL? It was partly through his example that I learnt about not taking myself too seriously, not getting hung up about my own propaganda. Yossi does that to people.

While I couldn’t make the Sunday sessions, I had the chance to watch them on video later. I was particularly fascinated by Paulo Coelho‘s keynote, Creating Universes: if you want to watch it, you can do so here.

Paulo speaks movingly about three aspects of the impact of the internet: language, copyright and community. On language, one of the points that stuck in my head was his description of the process by which “thee” and “thou” became “you”; he suggested this took a few hundred years, and contrasted that with the shift from “you” to “u” in this world of SMS and Twitter. Intriguing. On community, what stood out for me was his plea for connectedness, how lonely the life of an author can be, how important it was to have a community he could speak to, and how the internet, and social networks, was making it possible for him.

But the meat in the sandwich was his speech on copyright. Basically he owned up to self-piracy, to aiding and abetting the creation of a Pirate Coelho site, a site where BitTorrent links to pirate versions of his books were made easily accessible. You can get more coverage on what he said and did here and here. I was particularly taken with the quotes on the TorrentFreak site:

In 2001, I sold 10,000 hard copies. And everyone was puzzled. We came from zero, from 1000, to 10,000. And then the next year we were over 100,000. […]

I thought that this is fantastic. You give to the reader the possibility of reading your books and choosing whether to buy it or not. […]

So, I went to BitTorrent and I got all my pirate editions… And I created a site called The Pirate Coelho.

The key statement that Coelho makes is this:

You give to the reader the possibility of reading your books and choosing whether to buy it or not.

Coelho makes some other salient points. He confessed to not having the rights to some of his books, particularly the foreign-language translations. And that made me think about music and cover versions and mashups and just how messy all this has become. If a book is translated 50 years after it was written, does that mean it goes out of copyright in the original language and stays in copyright in the translated version? Does that mean no one else can translate into that other language? Just musing.

That reminds me. Do you remember a 1983 Bill Forsyth film called Local Hero? It’s one of my all-time favourite films, not least because of a wonderful Mark Knopfler soundtrack. [incidentally, I haven’t yet heard much about Knopfler’s latest, Kill to Get Crimson. Any views out there?]

In the film, one of the most memorable moments for me was when the salesman-type, played by Peter Riegert, gets all worked up arriving horribly late at this tiny fishing village, bangs uncharitably hard and loud on the door of the “hotel” he’s booked into (which happens to be the local pub); the landlord, played by Denis Lawson, finally pops his head out of an upstairs window and says “We don’t lock doors here“.

Not locking things up. Making things free. These are lessons that authors like Paulo Coelho are learning, and they’re learning something about abundance economics as well: if you make abundant things free, then you can create a larger market for the scarcer thing. People pay a premium for natural scarcity, not artificial nonsense like DVD Region Codes.

Making things free is not easy. Take a look at this 1999 BBC.com story about what Stevan Harnad was doing then, and, if you have the time, continue to follow it at this 2000 site. A cognitive scientist, I hadn’t read much of his work before, and writing this post has given me the impetus to correct that. One of the wonderful side effects of blogging.

We live in a strange world. Where else could we even begin to comprehend headlines like “Legal ways around copyright for one’s own giveaway texts”? Anyway, I’m glad that people like Harnad exist, glad they make the time to teach us about some of these issues. [An aside. Reading through some of the research for this post, I landed up travelling down an unusual road. Actual case histories of what happens when someone steals something free. The example in question was where a large consignment of free newspapers on a campus was confiscated by authorities….]

Even when it is possible and legal to give something away, it is not always that easy. Over 20 years ago, in a film called Brewster’s Millions, Richard Pryor plays a struggling sportsman desperate to get rid of $30m in precisely a month, in order to qualify for receiving $300m. He’s not allowed to tell anyone about his problem, and the money he gives away gets an annoying habit of coming back in enhanced technicolor.

Sounds paradoxical: the more you give away, the more you get. But to me it’s not. It’s The Because Effect, as Doc taught me all those years ago. When something moves from being scarce to being abundant, stop trying to make money with the abundant thing. Give it away. Make money because of that abundant thing, not with that abundant thing. Concentrate on what’s become scarce as a result, and make money with that.

if you’re interested in this sort of thing, then there are two recent articles worth reading. The first, by James Wisdom-of-Crowds Surowiecki. Writing in the New Yorker, he looks at The Piracy Paradox, drawing some interesting lessons from the fashion industry, looking at where imitation pays off, the creation of new markets, the affordability issue, and related subjects.

In a similar note, I dug up an unusual article in Reason magazine from about a year ago. Written by Henry Jenkins (whose recent books, Convergence Culture and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers I really enjoyed), Jenkins looked at the effect that unauthorised copying of Japanese animation had on the US market. The moral of the story is so simple it bears repeating. As Paulo Coelho said so eloquently, if you give people a chance to read something before buying it, if you make it easy for them to try your book out, then, once they figure out they like it, they will buy it. They. Will. Buy. It.

This is not just about books, it’s about all digital culture. if it is digital culture then it can be abundant. if it can be abundant then make it abundant. Concentrate on making money on the less abundant things, throw the abundant things around like confetti. If people like what they read or watch or listen to, they will be back. For the concerts, for the memorabilia, for the CDs, for the DVDs, for the bonus tracks, for everything.

incidentally, no post of this type on this subject can be complete without mentioning Creative Commons. I am delighted with what they are doing with this symbol below:

I love the words that go with the symbol:

A protocol enabling people to ASSERT that a work has no copyright or WAIVE any rights associated with a work.

How polite.