Author: JP

I love reading Tara at HorsePigCow; she writes stuff that’s sufficiently off-beat to make me think hard and go places I didn’t plan to go. Which is a good thing.

Tara recently posted on the death of the browser, and then followed up after a comment by JulesLt.

And it made me think. About the different behaviours people exhibit in the context of the devices they use, and how those behaviours change when the devices aren’t connected to the ether.

Let’s take the device first. And for the sake of this argument, let’s keep it simple and concentrate on the laptop or handheld computer.

Some people are happy to work “offline” on things, like choring through e-mail while connectionless on a plane; they get off the plane and then zap a plethora of mails out. They seem happy doing this.

I’m not sure why, but I don’t do this. And I perceive I’m not alone. I tend to work “analog” when I am not connected, rather than work “delayed-digital”. I read physical printed things. Listen to music. Sleep. Talk to people. And it’s not just the laptop, it’s the blackberry as well. No signal no writee.

Staying with devices. They become like pens. Some people want to use their particular special pen. Some will use the nearest pen they can find. Some don’t care. And that’s the way I see people use mobile computers.

When we look at applications, I take Tara’s Google Calendar point completely. There are some applications such as address books and calendars where you need an offline or no-connection facility, which requires a local copy. It is immensely frustrating to be denied access to low-volatility information just because you’re offline.

But you have to be careful. Local copies create their own evils. Synchronisation. The need for discipline in the size of what is synchronised. The problems of synchronisation failures or mismatches.

My guess is that there are some things where I would always want a local copy of the information, such as music and video and photo and address book and calendar. These are also things I can put easily on a USB stick. And all the synchronisation I want is probably at port or Bluetooth level in close proximity to the host device and independent of being connected to the ether. And I become personally responsible for the backing up and the housekeeping.

There are some things where I would always not-want a local copy of the information, where the joy comes from outsourcing the pain of looking after it and maintaining it and backing it up and and and. Like this blog.

As far as possible, I want to minimise the things I must have on my portable device, and have a full backup on flash memory. This way I can detach myself from device ownership, using the USB stick as my personal augment to any suitable device.

And offhand I don’t want to have anything that has to be replicated and synchronised between my device and a web server, too many things can and do go wrong.

But that’s just me.

An aside. I wish I could have an address book that worked like iTunes. A big library, with a Gracenotes equivalent to extend and enrich what I enter. And a simple way of creating contact playlists for phone, for blackberry, for laptop, etc.

Just musings.

There’s been some reaction to the musings I put forward in preparation for my next recap, particularly on the topic of caching-versus-long-tail; you can find the post and its comments here; Kevin Marks has some very worthwhile comments and links in his post as well. Thanks everyone.

The entire conversation made me think harder about hits and misses, how they are changing, what I think it means. So here goes.

First off I want to endorse and support what Kevin says, because I think it’s important. I quote from his post:

….we are moving to a world where we upload as much as we download

Just park that somewhere for now.

Let’s move on to hits and misses.

For sure I’m influenced by all the people I speak to, and all the stuff I read, so I have no precise idea where I saw the kernel for this snowball. But the way I look at it, today’s web paradigm, with search and discovery and tagging meeting collaborative filtering and social networks, and underpinned by the Kevin statement on uploading, this paradigm is all about misses. Not hits.

Hits are fundamentally abundant, and they need the application of a variety of devices to make them artificially scarce. Some of those devices are applied by hit originators and publishers: an example is the signed numbered “subscription” edition that precedes the abundant hit book. Some of those devices are applied by producers and distributors: an example is the staggered release of new films into different geographies (repeated in similar staggered releases into rental and purchase, aided and abetted by stupidities such as Region Codes). I could go on, but won’t.

Hits are fundamentally abundant.

[An aside. I think there is a link between the device of staggering film releases across geographies and the phenomenon of poor-quality piracy. There’s a bragging-rights aspect to watching a hit film. People want to be first. And where there are artificial blockages to being first, routes like piracy become attractive. If people want to reduce piracy, they could just do away with region-staggering. Just an opinion.]

Now let’s take misses. Misses are fundamentally scarce. Short production runs. Remaindering. Deletions. Out-of-print-ness. Whatever. And what the web does is allow us to create micro-markets around these misses, magically making them abundant again.

Now that’s a pretty pass. On the one hand, attempts to create artificial scarcities around abundant hits are failing. Leaving abundance. On the other hand, the natural scarcities implied by misses are being transformed into micro-market abundances.

Misses were fundamentally scarce. But are now abundant.

Both hits and misses become abundant, in markets where many business models were built around scarcity.

There is a difference. Hits can stay abundant in the physical as well as Digital Walled Gardens worlds, all broadcast models and DRMed-to-death distribution and simultaneous releases to global megatheatres and stuff like that can support abundance. Of a sort.

So people can and will go to the cinema to watch hits and turn on the television to watch hits and and and.

But with misses? The story is different. The ONLY place where misses can become abundant is in the micro-markets of the web. Long-tail don’t scale.

So over time I think, particularly for uploads and downloads of film and video, there won’t be a short fat head. The Snake On that Plane will be all tail. This may become true for books and songs as well, as the micro-uploaders get to Main Street.

It may just be possible that we can leave hits to their traditional and fossilised methods of delivery and distribution, and stop worrying about caching and bandwidth congestion; as the “bragging-rights-I-saw-it-first” become less important, people will choose how they want to access their hits.

What we should do is concentrate on the misses. It is in turning that scarcity into abundance that we create something of real value. Which is why I supported the abortive Google scan-everything moves.

Yes, it’s nearly time for the next recap. Tempus f. and all that jazz, but I hope to complete the recap before I go on vacation with the family in early August. So I thought I’d share a few things buzzing around inside my head, see what you think.
The first theme is about client-side and server-side software and how they’re evolving. More and more, as web services and SOA and virtualisation become part of our lives, we get the opportunity to look at what happens at client and server level with a slightly different perspective. Some old problems go away, and new ones emerge.

What I’m mulling over is this: As client installs become thinner and smaller from an end-user application perspective, we may get two significant benefits. One, we can make real progress on (client) platform and device agnosticism, with sharply reduced rollout costs and longer device lives, and even lower maintenance costs; and two, we have this by-product of real diversity at the (client) device level, a diversity that acts as a natural brake on virus propagation.

The second theme is about caching versus long-tail. A lot of the arguments about net neutrality tend to focus on “Someone must pay for all the upgrades we must do, in order to let all of you download all these videos that are going to clog up the tubes and make sure Senator Stevens never receives his internet“, while the real arguments may be about something else altogether: See Doc’s recent post on the subject, and Gordon’s follow-up.

What I’m mulling over is this: There’s a lot of talk about some form of local “neighbourhood” caching to solve the “problem” of video downloads (while happily skipping over the forced asymmetry with respect to uploads); I’ve even heard tell of trucks being deployed as mobile mega-caches. But cache what? I thought there was a very long tail of things people watched, as Chris Anderson quite clearly demonstrated. The caching discussions I’ve seen all tend to believe that the concept of “hits” will remain, which obviously makes caching useful. But I can’t reconcile the long-tail argument with the cache argument. [That’s one more reason for me to stay Confused].

The third theme is that of customer information versus DRM. Dick Hardt et al have done wonders in educating all of us about “It’s the customer’s data, stupid”. And Doc and Steve Gillmor et al have done similar wonders in getting us to understand attention and intention. So we’ve got to grips with the idea that the customer owns his/her intentions, purchasing behaviour, preferences, the lot.

What I’m mulling over is this: What happens to “content” and DRM hawks if the customer says no, you can’t have my data, it’s an invasion of my privacy? Aren’t those behaviours and profiles and clickstreams worth much more (to the content “owner”) than the apparent loss of revenue as a result of no DRM? What would the content “owners” do if someone suddenly turned the tap off. A sort of You Can’t Mine My Data Because the Data’s Mine.

The fourth theme is about synthetic worlds and their value to enterprises, particularly if Second Life met Tivo. You’ve already seen me get started on some aspects of this.
Blogging is provisional, it’s a sharing of nascent thoughts and ideas and kernels and snowballs, trying to see what happens if enough eyeballs see the thoughts and ideas. So, before I do the next recap, I wanted to get your opinions on these themes, see where I’m going wrong.

I’ve just signed up an alpha trial with Amie St, who’ve come up with an unusual model for acquiring and distributing music.

I quote from their blurb:

• Amie Street is all about letting its users decide how they want to discover new, independent music, who they want to share it with, and how much it should cost.
• Songs are sorted by 4 different measures of quality, just waiting to be discovered by you and your friends. We’ve made the process of sending song recommendations to, and getting them from, your friends as easy as pie. Shucks, we’ll even pay you to do it. We are striving to support new quality artists by helping them gain exposure to a larger audience while also helping them to survive financially, and to provide music fans a place to find quality new music and interact with the artists as well.
• Artists upload their songs to their Amie Street Store with no upfront costs. That song starts free on Amie Street and as its popularity grows so does the price. Artists earn 70% of each dollar a song makes after the first five dollars, which are used to pay for storing the song and maintaining the site. At no point does Amie Street take ownership of an artist’s music, nor do we ask that you sell your music exclusively on Amie Street- It’s your art! We do, however, ask for advance notice to remove your songs from the site.

Downloadable DRM-free. Royalty payments made via PayPal. A secure credit card processor that accepts initial deposits of as low as $3.00.

I know it’s early days yet, there’s no real “liquidity” as yet, and I know that Malcolm and Sean think porcine aviation will be the norm before I see any music I like on a site like this, but I’m not going to learn about what’s happening unless I participate. So I have.

Take a look and let me know what you think.

One of my all-time favourite books is Why You Lose at Bridge by S.J. “Skid” Simon. I’ve probably read it a dozen times; the last time (last week), it was after two decades of not playing any contract bridge, so I had to think about why I like it so much. Hence this post. Yes, I know this is meant to be a blog about information…. somewhere in my head, there is no contradiction :-)

First, about Skid. The day after tomorrow marks the 58th anniversary of his death, and I’d quite like to improve on the “stub” related to him in Wikipedia. I’ll do my bit over the next week or so; if anyone out there can improve on it, please do whatever you can.

There’s something peculiarly fascinating about contract bridge; I don’t mean the auction or traditional rubber bridge variety, this is about pairs or teams-of-four in duplicate or similar movements.

Why do I find it fascinating?

• There are open standards for communication. [Yes you can adapt and improve them, but only if you share the adaptation with the world at large].
• There are low barriers to entry to the game.
• When you communicate, you have to manage a very delicate balance between collaboration (with your partner, who may or may not be someone you know) and competition (your opponents).
• You can break with convention and use what is called a “psychic” bid, a hunch-based action; but you run the risk that it’s not just your opponents who get psyched, but your partner as well. You can buck convention, but there is a price to pay, and only occasionally it pays off.
• While there is a strong mathematical streak running through the process of bidding and play, a lot of it is about human interaction, about psychology. My father used to say you only need to know how to count up to thirteen, everything else is about people. It’s about people.
• There are enough combinations available for each deal, each hand, to be different. Throughout your life. It scales. And has variety and unpredictability.

I could go on, but won’t. What I will do instead is recommend you read Skid’s book. Here are a few excerpts:

From the inside front cover:

• You are the ordinary club player. You have a fair amount of playing ability, which you imagine is greater than it is. A smattering of all the more popular systems. And a pet system of your own (probably a variation of the “Two Club”) which you play whenever you manage to cut one of your favourite partners. Your bidding is adequate and your defence quite shocking. You have no ambition to become a master player, but you like winning. You do not keep accounts and tell everybody that you think you are about all square on the year. You lie and you know it.

From Chapter X: Fixed — by Palookas

• The title of this chapter is taken from an article….. the article described a rubber between two very clever experts and two honest palookas. Smacking their lips over the appetising meal offered to them, the two experts cut loose with an orgy of psychics that should have reduced their stupid opponents to a helpless bewilderment and fooled them out of all the good hands they kept on getting. But their stupid opponents were far too unimaginative to be fooled. They just looked at their cards and bid them stolidly. And as the rubber progressed and the experts took penalty after penalty, so their frenzy increased and their psychics grew wilder until they were fooling each other and ended up playing a lay-down Grand Slam in a part-score because each thought the other psychic. And the next hand they were too sulky to psyche any more, and the stolid palookas bid a stolid three No Trumps and made it, and won an enormous rubber. And the experts paid up and made no attempt to look pleasant.

The book is really in two parts, one about the mathematics and one about the psychology. The way Skid deals with common errors and misconceptions, how he focuses on simplicity and honesty, how he shows a better way, it is a real delight to read the book.

And his writing talent shows through; he was an accomplished comic novelist and (I believe) had his works (in collaboration with Caryl Brahms) adapted for the stage.

A bridge game is a small market. With conversations underpinned by open standards and conventions. Balancing a mix of collaboration and conversation. Rich in diversity, scaling across cultures, with low barriers to entry. Allowing a serendipitous view of mathematics and luck. Populated by experts and palookas and kibitzers.

Above all, it is social. In learning about bridge, we learn something about information and about ourselves.