Author: JP

One of the questions I used to pose to the graduate intake here was this:

How do you think people will interact with information in five years time? Will it be analogous to (a) bloomberg.tv (b) Excel (c) Green Screen (d) Google (e) XBox? [I avoided giving them (f) Blue Screen of Death]

All I was trying to do was to make them think. Get them to discover for themselves that all the answers are correct, that the way people interact with information is about personal choice. That it has to do with facility and comfort zone and familiarity and je ne sais quoi. To each his own. If it works for you, it works.

And that we have to build systems that bear this in mind.
If you want to take a walk up memory lane,  watch this video. I found it compelling watching.
Puts a whole new meaning to manipulating information. This kind of manual labour I could get into.

I was preparing for what will probably become my next post, triggered by something I read in the New Scientist. I couldn’t link to the full text of the article, it was hidden behind a Premium Wall. And it made me go off at a tangent, mid-post.

Most journals nowadays provide their print subscribers with free electronic access; some even provide electronic-only access at sharply reduced prices.

Why not let subscribers link to premium articles for free, via their blogs? As long as I have valid access to the pool, let me invite some friends to check out the water, as Seth Godin probably said sometime. Aren’t recommendations the most powerful form of advertising?

Obviously there are good, bad and stupid ways of doing this.

• Stupid Way: Telling me I can link to ‘n’ articles a year for free as part of my subscription. Trojan Horse route to more pernicious DRM and micromanagement of person and content.
• Bad Way: Asking me to pay some specified sum per link, small enough to attract me yet large enough to irritate me while I do it.
• Good Way: Suck Free Powerful Advertising from the Firehose of Recommendation. Let me do it whenever I like. As often as I like.

Which brings me to the point of this post. We have to move from this mindset of Itemised Billing Living. Run from it. And go as close to Eat as Much as You Like Living.

Trade as much as you like. Call as much as you like. Drive as far as you like. That’s what it should be like.

Instead, we’ve been sold this pup of usage-based billing, and what a pup it turned out to be. And we probably pay for it separately, for the pleasure of having itemised billing.

Get that pooper-scooper out. Usage-based tariffs are Trojan Horses that let vendors build baroque billing and administration systems that can then be used to micromanage you out of existence. [You, Sir, spent £5.37 last month on calls that suspiciously look personal…… How do you plead? Puh-lease. Give them Itemised Billing and they go and build an Itemised Billing Analysis Department. Fossilfools.] Usage-based tariffs are neither simple nor convenient.
Instead, we should strive for two purchase models.

As Much as You Like. Either Time-based (per month, per year, whatever) or Capacity-based (fill your trolley, your plate, your bowl or your boots).

One-off. Pay for the transaction. Nothing more.

[With due deference to Simon and Garfunkel: A Simple Desultory Philippic. Great song]

Kathy Sierra on what might happen if Sudoku was given the Big Tech Company and Big Marketing treatment. To be found here. Loved it. A lesson for all of us as to how we make simple things complex, useless, unworkable. Don’t miss the iPod bit at the end…..

Thank you Kathy. Made my day.

Thanks to Jonathan Peterson of way.nu for pointing me at Robert X Cringely’s recent post on Google, Microsoft, Intel and Yahoo, whom he terms “the four pillars of personal computing circa 2006“.

I usually agree with most of what Cringely says. For once I’m not sure.

And it’s not because he uses the term Four Pillars either

What I’m not sure about is the list of companies he’s put forward. Google. Microsoft. Intel. Yahoo.

Why am I not sure? Five reasons:

1. Generation M will define those pillars. And while Four Pillars for enterprise are still some distance away, Four Pillars for personal computing is now. Generation M is about Samsung and Nokia and Canon and JVC and Sony and some Motorola and yes, a lot of Apple from a hardware viewpoint.

2. The platforms that Generation M will use are those that make mixing things, mangling things, moving things around easier. Generation M has already signalled intent with major resistance to current DRM and IPR. I cannot see Microsoft or Intel or even Apple get away with attempts at putting that particular genie back in the bottle. Flash memory and N-AND RAM and Samsung still have stories to tell.

3. Generation M is already about co-creation, taking opensource and democratised innovation to new heights. They are into community, into sharing. They make things like facebook and youtube and bittorrent happen. None of the four companies mentioned is a leading light in the opensource world or in true community creation. Not even Google.

4. Generation M seems to have critical mass in places like India and China, and those markets are different yet again. It’s instructive to watch Samsung and Nokia in there.

5. Generation M is about mobility. And we have yet to see the end of the Net Neutrality and IMS debate. What is certain is that Generation M will reject the deals that regulators and incumbents come up with. Enough said.

Cringely may be right, and maybe I’m being too pedantic. Intel through Apple. Yahoo through Flickr. Google through being the new what-passes-for-a-platform. And Microsoft through XBox……unless Sony, a more appropriate proxy for Microsoft, wins….

 

The latest New Scientist has an article covering some of the discussions at CHI in Montreal recently. And for once it’s not a premium article, so I can link to it here.

It worries me, but for all the wrong reasons.

First, the headline: “Mashup” websites are a hacker’s dream come true. Most mashups are derivative sites and could perhaps reflect the so-called security weaknesses of the originating sites. Sounds like someone trying to sell me more Information Security consulting. I gave at the office.
Then, take a quote like this:

However, the informal manner in which these websites are thrown together means that information displayed on them could be inaccurate or false. Issues such as security and privacy may only be considered as an afterthought, if at all, and there is nothing to prevent people using them to obtain personal information, such as addresses…..

My impression is that mashups work for a number of reasons: they’re easy and cheap and cheerful to create, the hoops to jump through are kept at a minimum; the information they derive teaches us new things or gives us new pleasure or helps us do new things; they are created and co-created by people who love asking Why Not? as well as Why? If these sites can get hold of addresses or other personal information, much of the time it means the information was cleartext opensource available in the first place.

Carry on with a quote like this:

The worry is that mashups could be an accident waiting to happen, according to some delegates at the Computer-Human Interaction conference in Montreal, Canada, last month. Hart Rossman, chief security technologist for Science Applications International of Vienna, Virginia, and adviser to the US Department of Defense, warned that developers of these websites are not taking issues such as data integrity, system security and privacy seriously enough.

…..and it carries on: Central to the problem is the fact that the mashup developer does not own the data being mashed, while the owner neither knows nor cares that their data is being used.
Let me guess who said it. Oh yes, a chief security technologist. Why am I not surprised?

I think this is important. I don’t want to see phrases like “not taking issues such as data integrity, system security and privacy seriously enough”. That’s scaremongering. Selling security consulting. And there’s some of the Emperor’s New Clothes as well. As if these issues were perfectly dealt with before mashups came along. Yeah right.

Read the rest of the article for yourself. There are some very useful bits, but far too much head-in-the-sand-ness for me.

Privacy and security and data integrity are important all right. As are identity and authentication and permissioning which take up the same space.

We need to ensure that the weeds of DRM are not allowed to choke the mashup flowers. Let a thousand mashup flowers bloom. We need new answers to identity and access, but we are not going to get them by constraining new ways of doing things with old ways of stopping things.

That’s like trying to stop a car with a bridle.

New brakes please. New machine tools please.