Author: JP

Four Pillars: Taking the Empire out of Foundation and Empire

To me this particular Empire is all to do with proprietary behaviour, be it about Lock-in Layers or Digital Wrongs or Intellectual Property Wrongs.

So let me tell some stories.
I found the picture below in Tantek Celik’s Flickr, getting there via Matt: ComicPress via my own WordPress dashboard. Thank you Tantek. Thank you Matt.
132468961_5477d96945_o1.jpg

Tantek wondered about the number of soap dispensers visible and the failure scenarios in terms of vendors, refills and service that could have led to the nonsense in the picture. You can read his Flickr “blog” here. My not-really-cynical interpretation of Dispenser Row is that there were cyclical changes in staffing in the Procurement Department, and every change meant a new vendor for things like soap and loo paper and towels and driers. And it was probably cheaper to leave the old ones there than to remove and repair the unsightly holes in the mirror.
Then I saw this story in the Financial Times, about a Chinese DVD producer who was damaging the piracy segments there by selling legal DVDs. The story included the immortal phrases below:

Some international companies have already begun to respond. Warner Home Video’s Chinese joint venture CAV Warner this month began trail sales of a modestly packaged DVD edition of The Aviator priced at just Rmb12, and already issues some DVDs in China a month earlier than in the US .

So let me get this right. If I’ve understood the story correctly, Zoke is a Chinese DVD manufacturer who made the news by launching “retail sales of The Promise just 15 days after it hit local cinemas. And the Promise DVD sold for just Rmb10 (US$1.25) — a price that contrasts with the US$20-30 typically charged for a recent-release Hollywood picture.” Those quotes are from the FT story. You can read more Zoke stories here.
What’s wrong with this picture, I keep wondering. Chinese audiences now get legal DVDs earlier than in the US, for about a twentieth of the US price. Yup, that would do it. That would kill “piracy”.

Makes you think a bit about what causes “piracy” in the first place. I think I would like DVDs at a twentieth of the price and released two weeks after the film hits the big screen. I look forward to the next unsightly mess, as there are attempts made to stop the grey exports.

Random Walk Three is around my own kitchen. Our dishwasher broke down; it was cheaper to buy new than to repair. And then I had to do this very frustrating thing. Pay twice as much to “integrate” the device into my kitchen as to have it stand-alone. I don’t know what the US market does for this, but in the UK, if I pay X for a free-standing household appliance, I tend to have to pay 2X for the easily-integrable-cover-off version. So I have the choice of paying 2X or spoiling the consistency of kitchen cabinet facades.

And this made me think of the more proprietary software vendors and how they act. They seem to think it’s okay to say to us “If you want the luxury of our stuff working with your stuff and being coherent and consistent, then you’re going to have to pay. A lot”. In any other world I would be suing someone. But try and find out what rights you have as a software consumer. Diddly squat. Or maybe that’s unfair. You have the right to inadvertent trespass on the vendor’s rights, and the privilege, no, right, of being sued if this happens.

The final random walk is a reverse reverse chronological one, looking at Tim Berners-Lee’s first blog post. I reproduce it in its entirety here:

  • So I have a blog

    Submitted by timbl on Mon, 2005-12-12 14:52. ::
    In 1989 one of the main objectives of the WWW was to be a space for sharing information. It seemed evident that it should be a space in which anyone could be creative, to which anyone could contribute. The first browser was actually a browser/editor, which allowed one to edit any page, and save it back to the web if one had access rights.Strangely enough, the web took off very much as a publishing medium, in which people edited offline. Bizarrely, they were prepared to edit the funny angle brackets of HTML source, and didn’t demand a what you see is what you get editor. WWW was soon full of lots of interesting stuff, but not a space for communal design, for discourse through communal authorship.Now in 2005, we have blogs and wikis, and the fact that they are so popular makes me feel I wasn’t crazy to think people needed a creative space. In the mean time, I have had the luxury of having a web site which I have write access, and I’ve used tools like Amaya and Nvu which allow direct editing of web pages. With these, I haven’t felt the urge to blog with blogging tools. Effectively my blog has been the Design Issues series of technical articles.

    That said, it is nice to have a machine to the administrative work of handling the navigation bars and comment buttons and so on, and it is nice to edit in a mode in which you can to limited damage to the site. So I am going to try this blog thing using blog tools. So this is for all the people who have been saying I ought to have a blog.

Thank you, Sir Tim. [Yes I did change the spelling of discourse and bizarre, please forgive my editorial foibles].

Intriguing to think that, as averred by Tim, we were willing to do the funny-angled-bracket thing and not insist on WYSIWIG.

Not any more. The consumerisation and Generation M movements have made sure of that. When we scaled out our wiki implementation, the first “customer” (i.e. non-IT) screams were for WYSIWIG. And not as a nice-to-have. But on a “what the hell are you playing at? ” basis.

Random walks over. Let’s summarise.

  • Some of the problems we have today are caused by our own buying behaviour; we think we procure well, but in software and hardware terms we’re aeons away from where we should be. And we don’t know much about decommissioning. When we get taken out to lunch, we don’t realise just how often we are lunch. Tantek’s soap dispensers are an example.
  • Some problems are caused by sheer greed on the part of some vendors. Prices that are not set by cost or by “what the market will bear”, but instead based on “what we can get away with”. The Zoke story is an example of how we can change this.
  • Yet other problems are caused by real misconceptions as to who the customer is and what rights the customer has. Whose data it is. Whose systems. Whose flows. Whose processes. And at what price. The kitchen appliance example tries to show this.
  • And yet more problems are caused by our own willingness to continue with a “holy of holies” approach to IT. Following the footsteps of doctors, lawyers, priests. You won’t understand it, it’s too complex. We know best. We have our jargon, our rituals, our secret conclave. And you can’t come in. The Berners-Lee inertia story tries to capture this.

Making software platform-independent and device-agnostic. Minimising the costs of enterprise application integration by becoming smarter at what we do, not just blindly driven by yesterday (usually vendor-defined and matured to perfection) process. Using the opensource community as our Zoke and getting things at a twentieth of the price and months early. Avoiding stupidity in DRM and IPR. Bringing a bit of Ralph Nader consumerism into our community.

And guys, it probably begins with the internet. So once again, do whatever you can to support what’s happening at Pulver.

Save the internet.

Four pillars: The disaggregation and reaggregation of search

Brendon Mclean tipped me the wink on Splunk. A search engine explicitly for logs and message queues and database transactions and the like, “IT information”. Sometime ago Chris Locke had told me about Krugle. Finding search code and related technical documentation. Dohop, from Iceland, concentrates on building the best travel search engine. Dibdabdoo is all about hand-finished web laundering for kids, using human judgement to validate kid-friendly content.

So. While Google go serious on Appliance and One Box, and people like FAST come at the enterprise in a different way, there are people spending time and energy building specialised search. And I’m still trying to work out why.

So I tried to see what attributes search could have. For example:

  • The space being covered: a disk or server or many of them, at one’s desk, behind a firewall, everywhere, the web proper.
  • The type of thing being covered: text or file or image or music or whatever, as narrow or as broad as needed
  • The way the space is covered or indexed or checked for changes.
  • The way the searcher interacts with the engine and the engine with the searcher, including personalisation and relevance heuristics

Early search was all about the space being covered and the way it was covered or made relevant. And as I understand more about the Splunks and Krugles of this world, the bulk of today’s innovation seems to be about the “type of thing being covered”, with a little bit on the interaction between searcher and engine. iTunes search became spotlight this way, I guess.
I wonder. I promised Steve Patrick and Phil Dawes I would never start a “semantic web project” at the bank, because our own internal equivalent of industry body and standards body and vendor would kick into overdrive to kill it every which way, a sort of natural antibody ever-present in large organisations, whereas what I wanted was a Steven Johnson emergence.

Maybe this, the emergence of the Krugles and the Splunks, is how some parts of the semantic web will come to be. The data that Tim Berners-Lee wants to see migrating to the web may not always get there via standards like RDF, however hard we try. Because standards are meat and drink to lock-in specialists, about as meaningful and as useful as governments and regulators in preventing lock-in.

But a million different Krugles and Splunks covering different areas deeply and doing it in such a way that information ecosystems can evolve? Some sort of high-cohesion-loose-coupling approach to layered search. Open on standards and agnostic on platforms and opensource in approach. [Opensource free as in freedom, not as in gratis, in case people think otherwise]. Guerilla and emergent in business model and approach. Maybe.

I could be talking absolute tosh, but isn’t that partly what blogs are for? To start the snowballs rolling and to see what happens. If I have to go by the progress made by the zillions of standards bodies in IT, I’d rather back the guerilla approach.

Tim Berners-Lee in the New Scientist

I was reading the New Scientist over the weekend, and came across this interview with Tim Berners-Lee. [My apologies, but unless you have a subscription the magazine won’t let you get past the article stub].

I’ll paraphrase what the interview said; any and all errors and misinterpretations are mine and mine alone. Where I have quoted directly from the article, this has been made clear.

  • Web was about putting documents and images online; semantic web is about putting data online.
  • We can publish articles and papers now, but not the underlying data. We need the data.
  • To publish this data we need a mark-up language for data. So we created RDF.
  • RDF lets you put data on the web and make connections so we have one big database.
  • When we free this data magical things can and will happen.
  • Some get the power of this; many don’t; the life sciences guys are good at getting it.
  • Privacy and data protection are issues, but nowhere near as much as people make out
  • Web did not fulfil potential for showing the “how”, stayed on the “what”
  • As HTML became a truly powerful presentation medium, looking improved and editing died
  • Blogs and wikis are helping change that, though we have much to learn about social software
  • “We have to learn about how people like to make groups and learn about the social systems involved in collaborations as well as the technical side of things”
  • “The internet was designed not to care what was done with it. It just moved packets of information from one place to another: the fundamental properties that make the internet work could not be held to ransom”
  • “The internet is all about division between layers”
  • “The web tries not to prefer one sort of information over another”
  • “The web needs to be the way it is to work”
  • “Before the web, and even now, a lot of the systems were being designed to be completely consistent. The way we’ve traditionally done that is to make top-down hierarchical systems, whether in organisations or in programming. This has always been considered a good thing. The maxims of top-down, structured programming are “information-hiding” so that modules don’t see into each other but are black boxes tied together at the edges.
  • “The maxim of the web, however, is if you have something important, give it a label and then people will link to it.
  • “….by trying to constrain ourselves to use hierarchical systems, we’ve reached the limit of scale”

Lots of good stuff. More later.

Not quite Four Pillars: Using technology to remember things or find lost things

I was intrigued to see this story about an RFID enabled purse that lets you know what’s not in it. While the specific story is unnecessarily sexist, the principle has potential. RFID enabled checklists.

And it made me think about something else.

I’ve lost an iPod nano and an iPod shuffle. At home. I know they’re both there somewhere. But where I know not. Again, I am less worried about these two iPods gone astray, they will resurface sometime. But wouldn’t it be nice to have a way of finding your (submerged) next-generation iPod? Is there a way already?

Supernova and unconversations about unconferences

I’m mildly confused by all this kerfuffle about Supernova 2006, apparently kicked off by Marc Canter’s comments on his blog. I don’t know Marc, and I do know Kevin, and I intend to be at Supernova again this year. [Disclosure: I have been on panels at Supernova before, and cannot rule out being on one again some day].

I do not understand all the arguments, and don’t claim to be an expert on any of this. I am perplexed as to how Kevin can be accused of Having the Same Old Faces at the same time as Not Inviting Some Of the Same Old Faces. I do not believe Esther Dyson bought her right to speak by CNET being a sponsor. I do not think Skype was a large company when Niklas spoke two years ago.

But maybe it’s me, and I’m confused. Of Calcutta.

All this made me think of conferences, why I go, what I expect to get out of them, which ones I go to. And it made me think of all this in the context of the way we connect and co-create today.

And here’s my take:

  • There are no audiences any more. It is better to call them communities. Gone are the days when people spouted pap from the front and people lapped up the pap in the back. Today good conferences are conversations. Active and participative.
  • There are no speakers any more. It is better to call them moderators. Moderators with some stories and some tools, but moderators nevertheless.
  • Conferences have become rites of passage, ritual meetings of communities and subcommunities. So there is always an element of Same Old Faces, and an element of Missing Same Old Faces, and an element of New Faces we’ve never heard of.
  • Community conversations take place before, during and after the ritual meetings. In many shapes and forms. Including if necessary at unconferences across the road. This is not a big deal.
  • Yesterday’s on-the-edge ritual meetings are tomorrow’s establishment programmes. We already live in a world where Skype and Amazon and Google are called “Incumbent to Watch” in the Next Net 25 by BusinessWeek. So maybe Supernova and PC Forum and O’Reilly are already establishment. And reboot is moving there. And geek dinners and barcamps and unconferences are tomorrow’s establishment. Plus ca change….

So I’m looking forward to saying hi to some of the same old faces; meeting some new ones; listening to some new stories and occasionally some old ones as well. And learning more about what it means to be at a conference in this day and age.

Especially for people who fly in from places other than the US, people like me, the Same Old Faces argument doesn’t wash. I’m looking forward to meeting Amy Jo Kim again, even though she was at Supernova last year. I think she has forgotten more about communities than I know. I’m looking forward to meeting Esther Dyson again, having missed PC Forum. I guess she sees a few Same Old Faces on her travels. I’m looking forward to finding out how Saul Klein is doing, if it’s the ex Firefly guy via some DVD rental outfit in between. Because I want to know more about collaborative filtering.

And I’m looking forward to meeting Marc Canter for the first time in Amsterdam before that -)