Author: JP

• Many financial institutions banned staff access to internet mail. So the staff used proxy sites.
• Then they banned (or at least tried to ban) proxy sites. So the staff used Google to get to the site.
• Then they banned that (or at least tried to). So the staff used Babelfish or its equivalent.

I could go on, but won’t. Point made. Where I work, people came in one sunny day to find access to Google Groups had been banned. Compliance had made an apparently valid request to ban access to some elements of Google Groups, and the only response that Information Security could legitimately provide was to ban access to all of Google Groups. Something to do with the lists we bought. There was uproar. And we couldn’t really find anyone who would stand up and say “I decided to do this”. No matter, the key thing was that Google Groups access was banned. And so IT staff regularly went home to work, because they needed access to Google Groups to do their work. And over time we worked out an elegant-ish solution, parts of Google Groups became unbanned by request, all you had to do was explicitly state the group you wanted to belong to and why, and access was granted. And we lived happily e. a.
We live in an intensely regulated highly litigious society, and this sort of thing is part of the price we pay as a result.

Which would be hard, except for the sheer joy of the unintended consequences of sledgehammer actions.

Internet access is not that easy to regulate or control, and it is easy therefore to look for sledgehammer approaches.

Now let’s take a look at what’s been happening in India. [Here I am summarising aggressively, so please do allow me some poetic licence in the process]

• The Indian Government feels that a small number of inflammatory and abusive and religious-intolerant sites should be blocked. It tries to be responsible and proactive. Try being the operative word.
• Some of these sites are nothing more than blogs, and are therefore hosted on blogging infrastructures.
• Government says to relevant agency, block these sites.
• Agency passes instruction to Indian ISPs. Instructions are appropriately amorphous.
• ISPs can’t do this easily, so they go sledgehammer. Bans galore in Bangalore.
• Many blog sites become inaccessible. But not consistently.
• This inaccessibility is neither uniform nor ubiquitous, and in no way comprehensive. Or for that matter comprehensible.
• So the bloggers go to intermediate sites where there are no such barriers.
• One such site is pkblogs.
• Which, I believe, was created to give Pakistanis access to the blogosphere in unconstrained form, reacting to the cartoon backlash.

So we have Indians, denied access in their own country, (denied access as a result of a sledgehammer response to an apparently reasonable Government request), going to a “Pakistani” site (itself formed in response to another sledgehammer) in order to read their own blogs.

Or something like that. Hands across borders.
Snowballs, like nature, abhor vacuums. The blogosphere is borderless. The genie is so out of the bottle it needs a passport to get back. And genies don’t do passports.

Malcolm sent me a number of links to and around Snakes On A Plane.[Warning: Contains strong language].

While there are many reasons the film could and should make cult status, there’s something quintessentially Gonzo about the whole thing. A lead actor who takes the role because he likes the title. Then finds out they want to change the title. And makes sure they don’t. A preview “audience” that intervenes and changes scripts and scenes (partly via web competitions) until a PG-13 becomes an R rated film. Extra footage shot as a result. A veritable Hollywood of related and snowballed material sprouting out of the web, particularly at Youtube and similar sites. Mock advertisements and trailers and film snippets, mock mock trailers and snippets. And a statement by the lead actor that it will win best film at next year’s MTV awards. Unless knocked out by its own sequel.

So I had to tell RageBoy.

Who, being RageBoy, pointed me back at this.

Wonderful. [Warning: Contains strong language.]

I’ve been a fan of, and a subscriber to, FirstMonday for as long as I can remember being able to subscribe to anything electronically. In fact, I think it was my first-ever electronic sign-up, probably sometime in 1997, confirmed by looking at the fossil record of the e-mail address I used to register :-)

If you don’t already receive FirstMonday, I can only recommend you do. It was the journal that first made me think that blogging was the opensourcing of ideas….

Today was the day I got my July issue, and it gave me the chance to re-read Jonathan Riehl’s Digitising More Than Organisational DNA. It’s a must-read.

If we want to understand the power of the web in the context of information (as opposed to communities and networks) then it is important to understand what Jonathan writes. His synthesis of concepts ranging from Descartes to Vannevar Bush through to Tim Berners-Lee and Ward Cunningham is essential to anyone who wants to understand information in today’s context.

I just love the Explicit Decentralised and Named versus Implicit Centralised and Enumerated method of framing what the issues are.

It is in this context that we can best understand the implications for identity, for permissioning, for authentication. It is in this context that we can perceive the pain of Polluted Paths and the waste that is created by such Polluted Paths.

Malcolm’s post on Second Life, itself riffing off Scoble’s On Not Getting Second Life, got me started on this particular snowball.

If you haven’t done so already, you should check out Cyworld . [Yes, I know, I’ve linked you to the wikipedia definition and article and not to the site itself; since most of the site is in Korean, I submit that I am being helpful…]

I’ve had a Second Life account for some time now, and haven’t really done much with it. I’ve thought of doing things with it (like my aborted attempt to use Second Life as a stage for discussing Net Neutrality) but I must confess that it’s been more lurker and observer than participant.

Back to Cyworld. Over 17 million South Koreans use it; this is out of a total population below 50 million, so Cyworld has a one-in-three coverage. More tellingly, over 90% of South Korea’s 13-30 age group use it. Even more tellingly, more than half of SK Communication’s $110m revenues come from it. And half of that is made by selling dotori, the synthetic currency used in Cyworld.

That should give you an idea of the scale Cyworld operates at.

From my admittedly weird point of view, I see no difference between Second Life and Facebook and Bebo and MySpace and Flickr and last.fm. Or for that matter Skype and eBay. Or even Stardoll. By the way, every one of these sites/communities/facilities has an entry in Wikipedia. Amazing.
They are all communities where people can

• create virtual identities
• share interests
• build relationships
• converse with each other
• create (and co-create) value
• exchange value

Yes they are the same. And yet different. Different in terms of the narrowness or breadth of the interests they represent, the age-groups they attract, what is created, what is exchanged, how all this is done.

But they share one thing in common that is critical.

A low barrier to entry. Cyworld’s real popularity (and it is the Daddy of this genre) is its relative ease, the ease with which it could be adopted by a community that was not technoliterate. No html or PHP or control panels or sidebars or anything.

In a prior post I quoted Kurt Vonnegut Jr as saying “Be careful what you pretend to be, because you are what you pretend to be”. I also made reference to Halley Suitt‘s comment on getting a First Life before you get a Second Life.

This is why the low-barrier-to-entry issue is critical. We spend so much time ensuring that people are disenfranchised in the real world that we should not be surprised when they are attracted to synthetic ones.

Our challenge is to ensure that the synthetic worlds are complements to the real world, and not substitutes. That people are not disenfranchised to the extent that their only life is in Second Life. There is immense value to be gained in role-playing and simulation and synthetic worlds, in the serendipity and learning and experimentation that can take place. But this value is As Well As and not Instead Of the physical and real world.

So we all have to learn about these other worlds, in order to make our world better.

At a level of abstraction, the minihompy in Cyworld is a Dilbert Cubicle. In the real world, you get given a starter cubicle at work, and have to spend years crawling your way up the organisational ladder before you can have your minihompy.

Initially, cubicles are any-colour-you-like-as-long-as-it’s-black. No choice as to decor, but some rights to personalise. And it is only over time that the cubicle becomes a room becomes an office with a desk and a table becomes a corner office becomes a corner office with a window and a table and maybe even some art on the wall and wonder of wonders, a sofa.

Generation M will treat that as serious disenfranchisement. They want their minihompy today. With their skins and their devices and their personalisations and their preferences.

Or they will find an alternate world where they get their minihompy and not their cubicle. An alternate world which may be the one inhabited by your biggest competitor.

It’s all about enfranchisement. Connected not channelled.

Word has been spreading all day today that the Indian government has blocked a large number of blog sites. Both Dina Mehta as well as Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing commented across my radar screen.

I could be wrong. But my guess is that the ISPs were asked to do something they couldn’t, by a group of overzealous whoevers, and they resorted to the sledgehammer as the only way to comply. I’m going with inadvertent sledgehammer until and unless I am rudely awakened to a different reality.