Author: JP

Yesterday while posting about something else, I commented (as an aside) about not being able to load something into my VodPod, and about the error message I received. All I said was the following:

[….For some reason I couldn’t load it into my VodPod; the error messages generated were ante-Web, a meaningless five digit error number, so I chose not to proceed.]

The post was timed at 11.36am local time. At 4.39pm the same day, a Saturday (!), I received a message from Mark Hall at VodPod. He’d read my blog, noted the comments, explained in detail the situation with the video I’d tried loading, gave me a workaround, and even apologised for the “lame” error message. Mark then went on to describe my post as a spur to action on such things. I was flabbergasted, pleasantly so,  to see service like this, and replied to his e-mail immediately. In passing I asked him what techniques he used to scan the blogosphere. And, no surprise, he replied quite quickly.

I think that what I describe above is the shape of things to come, as we move from “customer care” to “caring for the customer”. My thanks to all at VodPod.

Why is this happening, and why is it different? What has changed? First, let’s take a look at VodPod. A product that’s about nine months old, from a company (Remixation) that’s about a year old. A product with over 50,000 members already, aggregating video from over a thousand sites. A company that seems to have no more than 3 people working for it. A company that bothers to see what others have to say about its products and services and then proactively gets in touch with the commenters.

Now that’s caring. Even more amazing when you consider I pay them nothing. Incidentally, they have some very interesting advisors: Philip Rosedale from Linden Lab and Toni Schneider from WordPress, two of my favourite companies. I’ve met Philip at a Supernova event some years ago, and I use WordPress exclusively for my blogging; I’m a big fan of what people like Matt Mullenweg have accomplished. Matt was one of the first people I saw who did this kind of thing, scanning the blogosphere and responding to comments and events.

What we see happening here is something really important. When you look into many Web 2.0 companies, what you find is that people who work in those companies care passionately about what others think of their products and services. Passionately. They have a sensible work-life balance (yes most of them do have a First Life) yet they care.

And that care shows through in what they do. How customers perceive them. Maybe all of us who work at large companies need to understand something about all this. Find the people who care, and make sure they connect with customers.

I went to see the latest Harry Potter film with my two older children this evening; one of the ads had as its theme “When Johnny Comes Marching Home“. And it took me back years. All the way back to Class 2C at St Xavier’s Collegiate School in 1966, “Small School” as I knew it.

It brought to mind some of the other songs I was taught that year, songs I still remember verbatim:

• McNamara’s Band
• Oh Susanna
• The Happy Wanderer
• Molly Malone
• There’s a Hole in my Bucket
• Que Sera Sera 

What a strange collection. A song from a 1950s Hitchcock film. A Harry Belafonte children’s song. An original postwar German song. A Stephen Foster “gold rush” song. Another from the American Civil War. An Irish anthem. And a Bing Crosby popularised  ballad.

All this in Calcutta, in the mid-sixties, in a Jesuit school.  Strange world. I wonder what they sing in Small School now. [Incidentally, I hadn’t realised that Park Street had become Mother Teresa Sarani. Or that the school year had been changed from January-December to April-March].

A few weeks ago I wrote about visualisation, using flight patterns as an example. More recently I came across this. While the 9 snapshots of “a day in the life of US airspace” are by themselves interesting, what entranced me was the QuickTime movie. [For some reason I couldn’t load it into my VodPod; the error messages generated were ante-Web, a meaningless five digit error number, so I chose not to proceed.]

My thanks to Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs for bringing it to my attention.

As we see information continue to disaggregate and atomise, and as we see its velocity increase, we are going to need better and better visualisation tools and techniques. While there has been much progress in visualisation over the last decade or so (especially in the use of fractal representation, heatmaps, 3D, even simple video and animation), for some reason this has not made its way into business life.

Maybe that’s one more reason I remain Confused.

We’re still stuck in a world of PowerPoint presentations of scorecards and dashboards and RAG indicators, fed by Excel spreadsheets and simple databases, and with considerable manual intervention. Considerable use of derived data. Considerable throwing away of useful information. Considerable scope for sins of omission and commission when interpreting the derived data.

Now most large-scale organisations are under market and analyst pressure to report more accurately and more quickly, and everyone talks about real-time information. Real-time monitoring. Real-time reporting. Real-time events. We talk a good story, but when it comes to true decision support and management information, we go back to using dead-paradigm slow-moving hand-crafted tools.

Why? Maybe it’s because we want to.  Maybe it’s because we want the control it gives us, the ability to edit and spin the summaries we create. So we spend enormous amounts of time creating, reviewing, refining and negotiating the content of these carefully hand-crafted artefacts. And we manage to convince ourselves that what we see is real and accurate and transparent. And that the Emperor has Clothes.

All this is going to change. It is changing now. One of the key outcomes from the march of Moore, Metcalfe and Gilder is our transformation into an event-driven society. We have the ability to sense so much more in real time. We have the ability to take the sensed information and move it around so much more quickly. And in this digital age, we have the ability to connect different sources of information more effectively, both by use of semantic tools as well as by heuristic learning methods.

Generation M, with their mobility and their multimedia and their multitasking skills, have an innate ability to leapfrog us. They haven’t been infected by Office. They don’t think that way. They’re already used to non-hierarchical ways of looking at things, at tag clouds and cluster maps and fractal images. They’re already used to seeing lots of atomised fast-moving information and making sense of it. They’re used to better simulations, better virtual worlds, more decentralised ways of behaving, quicker decisions, less pigeonholing, faster networking. They’re different. And God bless them.

I’m not saying that boardrooms are going to turn into 21st century air traffic control units overnight. What I am saying is that we waste enormous amounts of time and effort using tools that aren’t fit for purpose, and then somehow we manage to convince ourselves that all is well.

Generation M won’t fall for that.

Dominic Sayers, an old friend, erstwhile colleague and fellow cricket-lover, commented today on a post I’d written sometime earlier on “learning from the comments people leave on my blog“.  What he said was:

I thought you would enjoy this quote from a Cricinfo article today: “Kaif was cruising on 91 when Panesar stunned him with a Youtube moment”.

How soon before “a YouTube moment” joins the verb “to Google” in the dictionary?

As you would expect, I did two things. I googled “YouTube moment” and found it returned just under 18,000 hits. Then I went to YouTube, found this video and watched it. Looks like the Test series coming up will be interesting. Incidentally, I fail the Tebbit test spectacularly. I watch and support England every chance I get, have even had the good fortune to have been at two Ashes-clinching tests. But when they play India, things are different. it’s not Tebbit but Thatcher I land up following. TINA. India.

[The video is also on my VodPod in the sidebar in case you want to watch it later. I use VodPod to liberate the video link from the post].

On to the real point that Dom was making. YouTube moment as a neologism. Until Dom’s post, I never quite realised how useful the web is for tracking neologisms, one can almost associate a nascent phrase with a buzz factor and watch it grow. Or die.

And that set me thinking. YouTube moment. Whatever next? A FaceBook romance? A Flickr opportunity?

Wish I was a Kellogg’s Corn Flake
Floating in my bowl, taking movies

Simon and Garfunkel, Punky’s Dilemma

Take a look at what Dr Curtis Ebbesmeyer does for a living. A retired oceanographer, he studies flotsam. I was reading about the flotilla of rubber ducks heading Britain’s way after they confounded earlier predictions and made it through the Garbage Patch. Apparently they’re due for landfall here any moment.

And it made me wonder. What if these ducks had had GPS? How much more information would we have gained?

We are heading towards a world where GPS-ed plastic ducks are part of the wisdom of crowds.