Author: JP

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.

Thanks to Dave Morin for pointing this article out to me, suggesting that e-mail is losing its clout in a Generation M context. Like Dave, I love one of the quotes, from a Ms Kirah at Microsoft:

• “Like parents, they try to control their children,” she says. “But companies really need to respond to the way people work and communicate.”
• The focus, she says, should be the outcome.
• “Nine to 5 has been replaced with ‘Give me a deadline and I will meet your deadline,’ ” Ms. Kirah says of young people’s work habits. “They’re saying ‘I might work until 2 a.m. that night. But I will do it all on my terms.’ “

I wish I could say the same of the rest of the article, or for that matter the rest of what Ms Kirah has to say.

Here’s my $0.02 on where e-mail is going, as a result of watching Generation M working:

1. E-mail is now snail-mail, with all its consequences. A chore to do; formal and structured with letterheads and signatures and logos and all that jazz; a few important letters hidden in the midst of a pile of junk; usually filled with secondary spam as well, attachments and advertisements and whatever else people want to put into your e-mail envelope; hard to file, hard to find, rarely providing the context necessary to comprehend it and act on it; yet still part of our communications process, but far less so for Generation M.  And people read e-mail like they read snail-mail. If you haven’t got their attention in the first few sentences, then it doesn’t get read.

No longer fit for purpose, although it served many glorious purposes for many years.

2. Attempts to extend the breadth of e-mail by connecting everything else to a mail mindset will fail. Calendars and schedules; to-do-lists; reminders; alerts and subscriptions. RSS readers. Whatever. Over the last ten years we have seen the mailbox morph into something that has become a catchall for all this, and this was natural. For us. Not for Generation M. We are used to getting reminder letters from dentists and doctors and what-have you in snail mail, and we have faithfully reproduced all this in e-mail. Wrong. Paving cowpaths.

3. Like snail-mail, e-mail will not die. It will just gently become the electronic equivalent of snail-mail. Just look at what’s happening:

• (a) your e-mail address just became your phone number anyway, as telephony became software
• (b) there are better tools for point-to-point communications, especially with time-sensitive information; so people will use IM and texting for these
• (c) where a richer dialogue (multilogue?) is called for, blogs and wikis and IM, social software in general,  allow you to connect the conversation with the context. Like putting notes and comments on a flickr photo, or participating in a multipartite IM “channel”. As a result of this connect between conversation and context, it is easier to multitask, context-switching is cheaper and more reliable

4. The most important legacy that e-mail will leave us is the electronic contacts book, which (along with calendaring) will move inexorably towards a pure web-based world. Part of each person’s minihompy in the sky will be a personal address book and calendar, as our 19th century mail/calendar/contacts get past the growing pains of “social networks” and become part of our minihompies.

 

Maybe I can make it simpler. Why do I think e-mail could atrophy into an electronic variant of snail-mail?

Because I don’t see too many Generation M-ers wandering around with Blackberries. Or even Treos.

Now if the BlackBerry were an iPod phone with iPod coolth and iTunes support, and space for my photos and my videos as well, that just happened to let me deal with e-snail-mail and even browse the net, then….

 

I guess it’s been a long time since Cluetrain. So long that someone could write 95 theses for “geek activism” and do so without mentioning Cluetrain. Shows I’m growing old.

This came to me via Cory. It’s worth a read. Gives you a flavour of some of the current emotion, particularly in the context of DRM. Some very interesting links, and some worthwhile assertions.

My take? I think Generation M is coming up with their own theses, and they will take Cluetrain and opensource and emergence and identity and intellectual property and the internet. Mash it all up and create something new. And there won’t be 95 of them. Maybe they will call it 98 Theses or XP Theses or , heaven forfend, 2000 Theses or even A New Vista. Forget I said that, it’s been a long weekend.

You may have seen this story already, about a Bezos investment vehicle putting an undisclosed sum of money in 37signals, a firm that resolutely repelled all funding boarders before.

My post is not about Bezos or about 37signals, but about the comments this story has attracted.

Soon, we are going to have to figure out the answer to an emerging question, one that could have profound implications for how social software is created, funded, consumed and recommended.
Just who owns social software?

We spent the weekend with my mother-in-law down in Chichester. She lives in a wonderful flint cottage, quintessentially English in every respect. Including its garden.

Of late she’s been thinking of moving home, mainly to switch from living on four levels to living on one. She’s a talented artist and sculptor, and is very meticulous in everything she does. Including her preparations for potentially moving home.

Which brings me to the reason for this post, the kernel. A seed.

Her house has been home to her for nearly three decades, and over that time she has made the garden her very own. Now, as she considers moving from there, she’s  been preparing.

Preparing by using diverse means to create transportable copies of her favourite plants. The fig tree that miraculously produces giant fruit in an English climate. The rose bush that has a scent all its own, to the point it probably deserves bottling.

What she’s been doing is using seeds where appropriate, cuttings where appropriate, even seedling plants as needed. And planting them in stand-alone pots with the right earth and conditions. Planting them with love and care and devotion, and enjoying watching them grow.

And I thought to myself, what a simple yet elegant example of extreme nonrival goods with low reproduction costs. This is how snowballs and kernels work. Sure there is an economic model there and money to be made. People sell seeds and seedlings and cuttings and plants. And things to feed them and nurture them and look after them. And even pay people to do different aspects of all this.

People make money because of plants rather than with plants. Exceptions exist, and you can pay enormous sums for the exceptions. But they are exceptions. I can try to specialise in bonsai or orchids, or pay others to help me.

“Because of rather than with”, as Doc has instilled in me. And “my choice”. Two phrases that the DRM hawks would do well to learn.