Author: JP

I’ve been fascinated by the Because Effect, ever since Doc Searls first discussed it with me, set against the backdrop of Doc’s Making a New World and Stewart Brand’s The Long Now. What is this Because Effect? Doc describes it better than I can, but if it helps you any, I use the following definition:

When something that was originally scarce starts becoming abundant, something strange happens. You find that you start making money because of that thing rather than with that thing. That’s the Because Effect.

Prince has often struck me as an incredibly talented artist as well as someone who really understands trends. So it was with some amusement that I read this story, where he is described as having done a deal with the Mail On Sunday to give his latest album away free before it hits the shops.

Now that’s avant-garde. Don’t just give a track or two away, give the whole thing away before you put it on sale. I know, I know, you’re going to say “he should have made it a free download” or something like that; or rather, the Mail On Sunday should have done a deal whereby anyone who signed up to their free online edition had the right to download it for free or something like that.

Whatever. The point is that Prince understands how he makes money, what’s scarce and what’s abundant about it. Digital downloads are abundant. Concert appearances are scarce. He makes money because of his CDs and not with them.

A word of caution. Some people are just not comfortable with abundance economics, so they try to create artificial scarcities as they go along. Second nature to them, I guess. So please don’t be surprised to find that someone dreams up a scheme whereby concert tickets start being offered as triple plays at grossly inflated prices, bundling together the concert with the CD and the T-shirt. [In this context, there’s a lot of noise about artists being offered “360-degree” contracts by media companies, this is a dangerous trend.]

You cannot bundle abundance with scarcity, it’s like trying to implement region coding of the air that you breathe. But then some people will try anything.

Yesterday, while watching Madonna at Wembley, the stadium was pin-cushioned with thousands of tiny points of light. This time around the light sources were mobile phone screens. Thirty years ago, when I started attending concerts in earnest, I saw the same pin-cushioning. In those days the light sources were cigarette ends. There wasn’t a cigarette end to be seen at Wembley yesterday.

How times change.  Or do they? As happened with cigarettes, mobile phones emit light at concerts, are habit-forming and appear to have the capacity to make people ill.

I’m taking my family to watch Live Earth at Wembley today; whatever their interests, I’ve always encouraged them to watch things “live” rather than on television. So we land up in the strangest of places every now and then.

This time around, we booked a hotel in London to make a weekend of it, and I woke up at the crack of dawn as I am wont to do.  My wife was reading the paper in bed, and remarked that the concert line-up timings had been published. That triggered something in me, and I decided to try out the Live Earth on MSN coverage.

I guess I wasn’t expecting much. After all, I was on a Mac, on what passes for wireless in a London hotel, about to try and watch something via MSN that was sponsored by Chevy. Shall we say the omens were not good?

This is the site I went to. This is what I saw when I tried, somewhat pessimistically and resigned-to-my-fate-ically :

LIVE EARTH: THE CONCERTS FOR A CLIMATE IN CRISIS

THE CONCERT IS AVAILABLE FOR MOST INTERNET BROWSERS,
BUT FOR THE BEST VIEWING EXPERIENCE, USE INTERNET EXPLORER

We believe you are using a browser other than Internet Explorer. To proceed, choose the single video you’d like to watch:

Australia |  Japan |  China |  Germany |  United Kingdom |  United States-DC |  South Africa |  United States-NY |  Brazil |  World |  Green

To watch all concerts in a single player and at the highest quality, close this window, start Internet Explorer and browse to http://liveearth.msn.com.

In Internet Explorer you can:

• Simultaneously view updated status for artists at all venues
• See constantly updated information on all concerts
• Toggle between any concert venue you wish and watch additional “green” footage

And my heart sang. Some of you may be purists who want a lot more, but I hope and pray this is the shape of things to come.

I was no longer being forced by Microsoft to use Internet Explorer to watch an event live on MSN. I could choose another browser. My choice. Connected not channelled.

Far more importantly, I was no longer being forced by Microsoft to use their OS. I could choose another operating system. My choice. Connected not channelled.

In the past, whenever I didn’t go “native”, I had a serious degradation in quality; do you remember MSN Messenger on a Mac in the early days?  This time, thankfully, the QuickTime quality was quite acceptable. If I used Firefox and tabbed my way along, I could move from venue to venue, but what I couldn’t do was figure out how to manage the audio sensibly.

This was more like it. Next time around I expect to see other browsers offer more differentiating services, all around the same video content. Connected not channelled.

Anyone at the BBC listening? I cannot believe the decisions they made, especially when they are meant to be a public service.

But back to Microsoft. Maybe Hugh’s Blue Monster is having an impact after all. My faith in humanity is slowly being restored.

As promised, I ordered a copy of Michael Power‘s new book, Organised Uncertainty. And I’ve given it my first riffle-through, preparing my plan of attack for the next wave through the book. It’s a fascinating read for people of my persuasion. [If you don’t know what my persuasion is, then please take a look at The Kernel For This Blog and About This Blog, both of which should be accessible at the top of this page, depending on how you got here.]

Power quotes Douglas and Wildawsky as saying in 1982:

Can we know the risks we face, now or in the future? No, we cannot: but yes, we must act as if we do.

Later on, Power states ….”More importantly for the purposes of this book, the emphasis of communication was increasingly on the process of risk management rather than on its content.”

I came across early vestiges of this, of the impact of reputational and similar risks on organisations and their management structures, very early on in my project management career. [And I guess I got so frustrated by what I saw that it was only natural that I found my way to The Audit Explosion, and much later on to The Risk Management of Everything. It was only a matter of time before I took steps to meet Professor Power; we had lunch sometime in 2004, and now, having read his latest book at least one, I realise it is time to meet him again.]

Until I read Organized Uncertainty, I never really made the connection between this overgrowth of risk management and the distrust of agile management techniques. I never really understood the Emperor’s-New-Clothes-Syndrome. Now, slowly, light is beginning to dawn, to leach into my landscape.

Once you switch focus from content to process, agile techniques don’t stand a chance. Agile in a “content” perspective leads to the Baconian “A man that starts with doubts shall end in certainties”; agile in a “process” perspective leads to the other Baconian statement “A man that starts with certainties shall end in doubts”. These two positions are polar opposites.

As Douglas and Wildawsky stated, people act as if they know the risks they face despite not knowing them; they then disparage people who act to discover and potentially mitigate hitherto unknown risks. The Emperor’s New Clothes.

More later.

Information overload is of the commonest pushbacks against the take-up of social software “behind the firewall” in enterprises. I’ve always believed in “filtering on the way out rather than on the way in”. Now that’s great in theory, but the practice gets harder as the firehose grows in diameter and I get older. As a result, I’m always on the lookout for different ways of visualising things.

Recently I was pottering about at home while my youngest child (Hope, my daughter aged 9) was surfing, and I went to take a look at what she was doing. She was happily using StumbleUpon, one of my favourite tools, to go she knew not where. [Yes I do make sure that inappropriate content is blocked].

And she stopped at this video. As usual, I’ve made it available on my VodPod in the sidebar as well. [Incidentally, if you’ve ever wondered why I VodPod at the same time as providing the link, the answer’s simple. If you want to find the video link later you would normally have to search through my archives for the right post. Instead, by my using VodPod, you can get here straight from the sidebar.]

I think the Animusic videos are great ways of giving people a chance to visualise music, there’s something vaguely Heath Robinson-meets-Mozart about them. I will ponder over this for a while, trying to consider where else this type of imagery would come in useful.

Visualisation techniques are essential tools when dealing with information firehoses, and (IMO) are far more effective than filtering techniques. When you can add decent collaborative filtering, recommendation and ratings mechanisms to good visualisation techniques, the world is your firehose.