Author: JP

In a week when the New York Times announced that it was making its digital archives available to all free of charge, I found myself spending time thinking about open access publishing in general, spurred on by this article in the New Scientist.

Initially I could not get over the irony of finding that an article headlined “Information wants to be free” had been placed behind a paywall in the first place. But that’s not the point of this article, so I will let that slide. 

The first thing I did was to look up Wikipedia, something I am wont to do just for the heck of it. Why would I do that? Well, by looking up a word or phrase first in Wikipedia, I seem to be able to establish “baseline” information about the topic quickly and cheaply. In this particular case I had some snatches of memory to do with Stewart Brand originating the phrase ( and Don Marti “inflating” it, according to Doc Searls, as I referred to a few days ago).

So, in case you’re interested, take a look at Information Wants to be Free in Wikipedia. If you haven’t seen it before, then the Stewart Brand quotation is of immense value all by itself, so I reproduce it here:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Reading the New Scientist article also made me try and find out more about the author, Jim Giles, which then led me to his blog.

In the article, Jim highlights some of the dirty tricks being used by some publishers,  of the need for publishers to embrace change, and then writes in detail on a particular change, that of the underlying business model. I quote:

Almost 3000 journals already use the new system: instead of charging people for access to journals, they charge researchers to publish in them. The fees, typically $1000 to $2000 per paper, are usually met by the organisation that funded the research, and several big funders, including the Wellcome Trust, have committed to providing the money their researchers need. The articles are then made available for free online; in other words, they are “open access”.

Judy Breck, while covering the New York Times archive free-up in Smart Mobs, has this to say:

With my interest in education, I have particularly agonized over the fact that because its terrific articles and multimedia creations for science, arts and other subjects have only been free for a few days, they have been walled off from students and from connecting for other educational purposes.

Jim and Judy make some very important points. I am reminded of what the legendary Bill Shankly is meant to have said about soccer:

Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I’m very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.

Information in the right place at the right time saves lives. The web provides us with a path that can connect the people who most need that information with that information. More importantly, the web provides us with an affordable path. It is our duty to ensure that we do not allow that path to be polluted, or made less affordable.

My post yesterday elicited a few comments, and they took my thoughts down a different track. Today we have a lot of pushback against advertising. So why would someone predisposed to avoid ads watch something despite knowing it was an ad? Take a look at this video, with a whole pile of red flags around it. A “sponsored video”, in response to a “competition”. Despite the red flags,  liked it. What did you think?

There’s a little part of me that thinks we’re going to see something new emerge soon. We’re going to see marketers and advertisers compete for “sponsorship” of ultra-short videos and cartoons, which will become a whole new art form.

Micro-sponsorship at event level, where each clip is an event. The event itself will have no relation to the brand or product doing the sponsoring, or at best a loose connection. What does AIG have to do with Manchester United, or for that matter Carling to do with football? So what we see in the world of sport will move into the world of YouTube, but the “events” being sponsored will get smaller and smaller.

After all, people are spending real money getting away from advertising. Ad blockers. Special features in PVRs. You name it. Digital technology allows us to do this; you can’t pay to block out advertising at the FA Cup final, for example. Soon we will see that concept migrate to the digital world.

Just musing.

I’ve always imagined advertising to be about a transfer of information, connecting the customer to the product or service. And there’ve been different ways of doing it, some good, some not so good.

In the first age of advertising, recommendations flowed from the product marketers to the customers. Try this. Buy this. Nine out of ten cats this.

In the second age of advertising, recommendations flowed from celebrity product endorsers to the customers. Trust me I’m an expert. So what if I got paid a gazillion to do this, would I lie to you?

In the third age of advertising, recommendations flowed from customers to customers. Unsolicited. Come take a look at this, isn’t it fantastic? Whatever you do, do not repeat not buy that, it’s a load of **(££.

Maybe we’re on the verge of the fourth age, when recommendations flow from the customer to the product. I want something that looks like this, that feels like this, for yea much, by this time.

Maybe none of the ages actually stopped, we’re just discovering better and better ways of having real conversations about customers and products and services.

I don’t really watch ads any more. Yet I found myself watching this video. Maybe advertising will come back via YouTube after all. But with a difference.

We choose what we watch. When we watch it. Where we watch it. We choose to watch the ads because our friends recommend them, because they think we might enjoy watching them. Maybe we even get collaborative filtering going…. people who liked Ad A also liked…..

One way or the other, it’s rare that I enjoy an ad. So see what you think.

Now

I quote from the Economist’s leader on recent events in the UK banking sector:

….This debacle holds lessons for the way Britain regulates its banks. As Mr King pointed out, defending his performance in front of a House of Commons committee on September 20th, the law prevents the Bank either from staging a covert rescue operation or from engineering a swift takeover; and flaws in the protection of depositors mean that, once an overt rescue operation is under way, depositors will flee. Mr King defended the separation of powers between the Treasury, the Bank and the FSA, but he was wrong to. It has exacerbated the system’s flaws; nobody was in charge of the operation.

Nobody was in charge of the operation. 

Somehow, over the last decade or so, this has become true in so many places, in so many ways. Multinational organisations, governments, public sector companies, the private sector, everywhere. The story is the same. Quango-ed and committee-d to a point of gridlock, decisions are often glaringly visible only in their absence. Accountability becomes a word reserved for matrix charts and consultant-speak. And when something actually happens, almost everyone heads for the hills. A few remain to shoulder the blame and to mop up.

Nobody was in charge of the operation.

I saw a recent report in the UK suggesting that there’s been ballistic growth in the number of quangos here since 1997; the cost of such quangos was described at around £188 bn, which is over twice the NHS budget or, for that matter, the Defence budget. I hear that similar things are happening in many other parts of the developed world. [Who knows, maybe it’s time to come up with a new term “artificial employment”.]

Northern Rock. Katrina. Terrorist actions. Enron. Worldcom. Whatever else you want to add to the list. So many committees, so little time.

We need to think hard about what’s happening. We seem to be sprouting whole armies of intermediaries everywhere, lost in the vegetation of modern jurisprudence and legislation, creating something far worse than just the nanny state; a state where it is no longer possible to lead or to “govern”. A domino-effect house of cards where so much effort is made to manage risk that the risks themselves intensify into something new and infinitely more dangerous.

Small print and get-out clauses overshadowing and dominating the space, drowning the valuable, yet vulnerable, voice of professional opinion.

Nobody was in charge of the operation. The natural consequence of our becoming ever more part of a world driven by The Risk Management of Everything. [I definitely need to catch up with Michael Power.]

Some of you may have been surprised to see the Byte Night “advertisement” appear in my sidebar. I haven’t suddenly changed my mind and started allowing ads to be placed on the blog, nothing like that.

It’s something far simpler. Along with four of my colleagues, I’m spending the night “sleeping rough” on the 5th of October, to try and raise funds for a children’s charity; the particular focus is to provide shelter, succour and support for homeless youth, reaching out to them during what is perceived to be a critical time for them. Byte Night is a peculiar UK tradition, focused on the IT community, and this time I felt it was time for me to do my part.

You can read up on them by following the Donate link. Of necessity this type of action is local and regional in context, my apologies to readers farther afield. The blogosphere, as part of the web, remains the most effective way to connect with people and get such messages across. And I’m always keen to find ways to help charities keep their administrative costs as low as possible, so that the funds reach the people and the causes they need to reach.