Author: JP

I’ve always enjoyed the Francis Bacon quotation:

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.

It seems to mean more to me as I grow older. Odd, that.

And it was with this quotation in mind that I resonated with Doc Searls’s statement that blogs are essentially provisional in nature, and I try and behave that way.

So you can imagine how I felt when I read in Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography:
….And as the chief ends of conversation are to inform or to be informed, to please or to persuade, I wish well-meaning and sensible men would not lessen their power of doing good by a positive assuming manner that seldom fails to disgust, tends to create opposition, and to defeat most of those purposes for which speech was given to us.

In fact, if you wish to instruct others, a positive dogmatical manner in advancing your sentiments may occasion opposition and prevent a candid attention.

If you desire instruction and improvement from others, you should not at the same time express yourself fixed in your present opinions. Modest and sensible men, who do not love disputation, will  leave you undisturbed in the possession of your errors. In adopting such a manner, you can seldom expect to please hearers or obtain the concurrence you desire.

Pope judiciously observes: Men must be taught as if you taught them not, and things unknown proposed as things forgot.

Interesting sentiments. And how pleasant to be able to quote them without having to worry about copyright, I think even retrospective Son-of-Mickey-Mouse Acts will leave Benjamin Franklin alone. But maybe I’m wrong.

Tristan Robinson brought this to my notice. Thanks Tristan.
In Memoriam.

Yup, the blog’s gone. For now at least.

Here’s what Fake Steve has to say about it:

Dudes, I had no idea this blog was getting read so widely. I’m being held in captivity during the WWDC — scary story of rendition etc., which will be my firt new post. Anyway, I will relaunch soon, not sure where yet. Will keep you friggin informed. Like, with a post here or whatever. And FYI this is NOT an Apple publicity stunt. You really don’t think they have that much sense of humor, do you?
Cheers–
Fake Steve.

Nature abhors a vacuum. So don’t be surprised to see many where there was one.

Clarence Fisher provided the kernel for this particular post, telling me about Bookmooch.

And it made me think. About books and the web. [An aside. When Amazon entered the Fortune 500 whom did they replace? AT&T…..)
First we had Amazon, a way of discovering and acquiring new books. For a while we also had ZShops as part of Amazon, followed by Amazon Marketplace.
Then we had eBay, which allowed us to acquire used and out-of-print books and a whole lot more.

So along came abebooks, concentrating solely on the purchase of new and second-hand books.

Then we had librarything, allowing individuals to catalogue what they had and share that catalogue, without having to remember ISBN codes. You might as well memorise pi if that’s what gets your rocks off.
Somewhere in between we had bookcrossing, allowing almost-serendipitous discovery of books to read.

Now we have bookmooch.

[Anyone else have more names to add to this, feel free to comment].

So we have different levels of granularity in the discovery of inventory, in the discovery and setting of price, in the taxonomy of the inventory, in exchange models. We have different “currencies” in use for fulfilment, from cash to near-cash to points to nothing at all. As with many other markets, liquidity is critical and specialisation brings its own risks and benefits.

We’ve also learnt a lot about ratings and reviews and collaborative filtering as part of this bookmarket. As we see more pseudocurrencies we will see exchange rates emerge, and some form of title transfer a la Navio.

So what next, besides the obvious use of location/context-sensitive services and greater mobile access to the services?

I guess I’m less worried about the what next, what concerns me is the what Not Next.

• Please, no attempts at vertical integration. It is the competition between horizontal layers that makes this market exciting.
• Please, no attempts at putting more garden walls around the information. Less is definitely more. Let the customer keep control of his information.
• Please, no attempts at bringing DRM into what is a physical delivery market, particularly via the back-door of some of these sites.

In a classic HughTrain mode, micromarkets and microniches will emerge around the book sector; they will associate themselves with different “currencies” and different liquidity pools, different models for making money, different ways of fulfilling transactions. From Assembly Line through to Serendipity. From Free to Exoensive-Because-You-Like-To-Pay-Through-Your-Nose. It’s only a matter of time before someone comes up with a market concentrating on left-handed between-the-wars original pulp cover art, and finds a way of making money out of it. Because Of rather than With.

I try and learn from all these things. Who has the most comprehensive inventory. Who allows me to discover the best price. Who is most likely to guarantee fulfilment of the transaction. Where collaborative filtering gives me the best value.

And I’m looking for a lot more. Simpler ways of cataloguing, valuing and pricing what I have. Even easier ways of adding to, or subtracting from, my inventory. More ways to discover new authors and out-of-print books. More convenient fulfilment methods.

It will happen.

An aside. For many years I dreamt of setting up a bookshop as and when I was put out to grass by Big Business. And I wanted it to be different. No prices at all. Just three types of book:

• Over My Dead Body: You can look, touch, even read, but it’s Not For Sale.
• Make Me An Offer: Prepared to trade, if the price is right.
• Take It Away Jose: Just pay for the bag :-)

But that was a long time ago. Now I dream of setting up a school. Which is why I read people like Clarence Fisher. And when I have that school up and running, I will retain my book-connection by having a library in that school. (And a little book-restoration workshop on the side, as a hobby).

It had to happen. Second Life meets S.O.A.P. Check this out.

Looks like machinima is the next word for my vocabulary after minihompy. Not neologisms, just new to me. I live and learn.
This week, Second Life has already had Suzanne Vega and Howard Rheingold, they’re due to have Kurt Vonnegut Jr tonight, and (for those somewhat younger than me) Duran Duran have recently bought a virtual island to perform on. See this schedule if you want to get an idea of what’s happening.
It’s funny how people keep asking “Where are the aggregators?” I wonder what they think a Google or eBay or Amazon or Youtube or Wikipedia or Technorati or Second Life are.

Some parts of the Second Life model are fascinating. I particularly like the way the medium (can I call it that? I’m not used to saying metaverse, but I guess I’ll learn) allows both scarcity and abundance to coexist for the same product. It’s not far different from getting, say, Reuters prices at a premium instantly, or free-to-air with a fifteen minute delay. This can be done in isolation in Second Life. By the time you factor in other universes, so to say, we’re going to see some interesting shifts in what abundances and shortages can mean.

I’ve wrestled with this issue for a few decades now, through the Strassmann and Carr arguments and a whole slew in between. And sometimes it feels a bit like The Emperor’s New Clothes. It’s just not done (in polite circles) to point out the guy’s not wearing any.
When I look back over the years, I find that my arguments came down to this:

1. Costs are easy-ish to measure, benefits aren’t.

2. Even if costs are easy-ish to measure, allocating them is often a major headache.

3. And if allocating costs is hard, try “allocating” benefits. Just try it.
4. Quite often the decision is already made, by people with the authority to make the decision, so where’s the value in post-facto bureaucracy?

5. The process of trying to define, measure and crystallise benefits is itself so amorphous that it lends itself to arbitrage; more projects “fail” as a result of benefit-arbitrage politics than is commonly known or accepted. It’s along the lines of “When you can’t deliver the benefits, get your defence in first. Attack the project.”
So I spent time looking at Andrew Abbott’s The System Of Professions and the Searls/Brand Because Of Rather than With, spent time looking at democratised innovation and its implications, trying to figure out how best to deal with the issue.

I never questioned the need to have a real and communicable plan, a routemap, an expected cost and an expected timescale. I never questioned the need to ensure that the decision-maker(s) were empowered to make the decision(s). I never questioned the need to have good feedback loops and monitoring processes. What I questioned was the process by which the benefits were “created” and then used as an opportunity for arbitraging the rest of the project, and how much time and money was spent arguing about them prior to project initiation in comparison with post-implementation-benefits-analysis.

So it was with considerable interest that I read Andrew McAfee’s recent post on The Case Against The Business Case. I was particularly intrigued to see the comments made by Bob Kaplan on the topic; I will now go and read Strategy Maps, I’d bought the book and not got around to reading it.

Thanks, Andrew! Much food for thought.