Author: JP

Cartoon courtesy the ’09 archives of the LA Free Press

How much do you make? Have you ever contemplated suicide? Are you now or have you ever been…? Are you aware of the fact…? I have here before me… […]information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community’s need to know. The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions — the patterns of mechanistic technologies — are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous […]information retrieval, by the […] computerised dossier bank— that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early “mistakes”. We have already reached a point where remedial control, born out of knowledge of media and their total effects on all of us, must be exerted. How shall the new environment be programmed now that we have come so involved with each other, now that all of us have become the unwitting work force for social change?

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter — and getting smarter faster than most companies.

These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.

By now some of you would have recognised some of the words above. They form part of the opening paragraphs of the Cluetrain Manifesto. Written all of thirteen years ago, in 1999. A very long time ago.

You’ve read Cluetrain, but you don’t recognise the first paragraph? Not surprising. It’s not from Cluetrain. It was written well before Cluetrain. Thirty-two years before Cluetrain, in fact. By Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore in The Medium is The Massage. A very very long time ago, in 1967.

The wires have been buzzing these past few days, with dozens of stories about openness and closedness, about walled gardens and the open web, about HTML5 apps versus mobile apps, about the app internet, about someone’s turn to be evil, in this case Google. [Sometimes, at conferences, I wake people up by saying “it took IBM 40 years to become evil; Microsoft took 20; Google 10; Facebook 5; Twitter 2.5. But that’s for another post some other day].

This post has a simple message.

It’s over.

We can all argue till the end of time about how many angels can dance on top of a native app, but it won’t change a thing.

It’s over.

We can debate about whether the “app internet” will destroy the Net, or whether the internet will “route around obstacles” as it is wont to do. It won’t change a thing.

It’s over.

We can point fingers at Facebook or Google or Apple or Amazon and find ways of convincing ourselves that their particular brand of evil signals the end of the world as we know it, but it won’t change a thing.

It’s over.

Now that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read what people are saying. So do read the recent Pew Internet report on The Future of Apps and Web if you want to understand what’s happening in that space. Do read GigaOm’s Cloud Services and The New Platform Wars if you want to be informed about that particular aspect. Do read Gizmodo’s The Case Against Google if you want to learn more about why all this kerfuffle is coming up now. And while you’re at it, read Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future Of The Internet and How To Stop It. Don’t stop there, make sure you read The Master Switch by Tim Wu; and while you’re at it, please ensure you include Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble.

These are all good articles and books; I’ve read them all, and I’ve learnt from them all. Learnt. But not worried.

Because it’s over.

No going back.

People are empowered now; they’re connected, not channelled, as I wrote in the Kernel For This Blog seven years ago.

They will choose whom they spend time with, what they spend time on. They will choose which devices they use, when, where, how; they will choose how they are connected and for how long; they will choose whom they trust with what they make, and whom they trust with what their friends make. They will choose what they pay for, how, to whom and why.

They will choose.

And when someone tries to stop them, they will choose to let that someone know what they think. Individually and collectively. Severally and jointly. Vocally. Very vocally.

So while the kerfuffle continues unabated, I’m spending time reading up on other things. Things you may prefer to read.

Things like Open Garden.

Imagine, instead, if all of the smartphones in any location could use their formidable processing power to share access to the Internet. The result would be an open garden – one without walls. Our handsets would be free to guide each other to the nearest available Internet offramp, regardless of whether it’s a wifi hotspot, a 4G base station or a femtocell.

Things like Ringmark.

The Ringmark test suite has been developed by Facebook and Bocoup, with a huge debt to prior research from the web community including projects like Modenizr, caniuse, Are We Playing Yet, and the W3C tests. We will be open-sourcing Ringmark in the coming weeks. Eventually, we hope to contribute Ringmark to the Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group, a W3C community group tasked with creating mobile browser standards and testing tools that will make the mobile web easier to build on and support.

Life has not been easy for incumbents in traditional “publishing” industries: books, magazines, film, television, music, software, they’ve all been affected. Radically. And irreversibly.

Attempts to re-create the lock-ins of the past are understandable, even predictable. Although it does make me smile when Microsoft comes along and claims the answer to the “end of software”: hybrid clouds. It sort of even makes sense in a Soockholm-Syndrome way:

If you’re a prisoner, then even limited parole looks like freedom.

You can’t blame the monopolists. Native apps and app stores turned out to be runaway successes; the mobile web exacerbated this success; and suddenly they thought Mummy was right, everything was going to be all right.

Wrong.

The genie is out of the bottle.

Elvis has left the building.

 

 

 

Little Milton. That’s the nickname given to Gerald Bostock by the village of St Cleve, after he’d been presented with a poetry award when he was about 8. We’re given to understand that the award was revoked after he was heard uttering the word “g—-r” during a live television broadcast. [I’m not going to spoil it for you by telling you what he actually said. DM me on Twitter if you really want to know and can’t be bothered to find out. I’m @jobsworth over there.]

Gerald Bostock. The child prodigy who “wrote” the poem that formed the basis of one of the finest parody-concept-albums ever, Jethro Tull’s Thick As A Brick.

St Cleve. The village that published the paper that became the cover of the LP. If you look carefully, you may be able to recognise “Little Milton” receiving the award prior to it being revoked.

 

 

All that seems a very long time ago, because it was a very long time ago.

Gerald Bostock turned 50 earlier this year. He lied about his age in 1972.

How do I know that? Because the St Cleve Chronicle, Covering Linwell, St Cleve and Little Cruddock, has moved with the times, and is now purely online at stcleve.com.

Gerald has also moved with the times. He now has a Facebook page. A twitter account.

In fact, Gerald and St Cleve have outpaced Jethro Tull, whose web sites jethrotull.com and j-tull. com both appear to be showing the age of the band rather than the web.

But Ian Anderson, synonymous as he is with Jethro Tull, appears to have done all right. There’s a decent YouTube video out. And this metafilter post gives you a good idea of what else is happening. [Thank you @marxculture].

I first heard rumours about a “sequel” maybe eight or nine months ago. Started looking for information about a Jethro Tull tour immediately, and purchased my tickets for the April 27th concert six months ago. Now, with so much more known, I know I’m in for a real treat. The whole of the original Thick As A Brick. And the whole of the sequel.

I found out about the concert via a Ticketmaster alert, and bought the tickets via them. Was told about the way the story was unfolding via a community blog, the link for which was @messaged to me by a friend via Twitter. Wouldn’t have been able to write anything meaningful here except for Wikipedia.

Little Milton is 50. And how his world has changed.

 

 

Have you read Haydn Shaughnessy? If you’re interested in the social enterprise, you should. I haven’t yet read his recent book, The Elastic Enterprise, but I will: I intend to read it as I cross the Atlantic on my way to SXSW later this week. (I’m speaking there on the Saturday, on Massively Multiplayer Work, and at least 12 people have said they’d turn up for it).

Following on from a post he’d written in January, headlined Understanding Social: An Infographic of a New Business Idea, Haydn continued his train of thought with a post today: Why Social Business Will Fail (And How To Save It).

Haydn argues that for businesses to become truly social, they must be transformed, and radically at that. This transformation takes place in three dimensions. First, there is a change in how people are connected and how they communicate, both within the enterprise as well as beyond the enterprise, supply chain and distribution network, all the way to the customers themselves. Second, this transformation affects the very fabric of the industries involved, its participants, structures and processes as they evolve into open platform-based ecosystems rather than vertically integrated silos. These two facets, when taken in combination, then yield the third dimension: a genuine focus on the creation and evolution of shared value.

I’m a long-term Cluetrain devotee, so I’m not about to start arguing with those views. [Disclosure: Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger and Rick Levine are good friends of mine. And the 10th Anniversary Edition of the book contains a chapter written by me.]

Maybe some of you haven’t read Cluetrain as yet. Please do something about it. Now. Read it here. Go buy the book. Scan the teaser I’ve stuck below here, listing the first 16 of the 95 “theses” that make up the book. Do something. Now.

 

Amazing, to think that all that was written maybe 14 years ago.

Haydn uses the examples of Apple and Amazon to explain how a truly social enterprise changes industrial landscapes irreversibly, how the ecosystems evolve, how participants create and share value. Again, I couldn’t agree more, other than to point out that the radical transformations that Apple and Amazon have wrought, they result in at least one effect that doesn’t get mentioned: the slimming down, exit, sometimes even extinction, of many of the incumbents in related industries.

The separation between customer and employee, as evinced in the pre-Cluetrain world, is blurring. In a true social enterprise, the informed, connected, empowered customer is now engaging with the informed, connected employee: it is no surprise that the value created is truly shared.

Haydn also makes the point that the implementation of a social media layer on existing operations and processes is not what makes a business social.

Social is about sharing. And about the creation of shared value.

Social is about business transformation, albeit a renaissance of sorts.

Social is about a radical restructuring about the relationships and flows within a market.

Social is about changing the way we work.

The social enterprise represents an inflection point for the very concept of enterprise.

That’s why the vision of Marc Benioff and his team makes sense.

And that’s what attracted me to join the company.

 

 

Serendipity is a wondrous thing. 

Yesterday, as I did my leisurely trawl through the three hundred or so people I read regularly, I came across Tom Foremski’s intriguing post. Is Skype A Social Network? That set me off on a gentle, aimless wander on what makes a network social.

Then, a little while later, I noticed that Anne Zelenka, another person I read regularly,  had written a fascinating piece about mashed-up selves. And by the time I finished reading that, I was off on tangents of delight, ruminating about what makes a networked human social.

In our family, we have a simple routine when it comes to birthdays. As long as you’re in town you’re expected to make Sunday lunch, with the venue chosen by the person whose birthday it is. Today was one such day, and the cuisine chosen was Greek. We had meze, a family favourite. And it gave me the chance to observe, yet again, how wonderful it is for friends to sit and break bread together.

And then I went to Wembley to watch the Carling Cup Final. And everywhere around me there were people taking photographs. All kinds of photographs. The stadium. The teams. The play. And one other thing. The “We were there. Together” version. Mark Hillary’s photo showing Mark and Angelica with friends at an Oasis concert there a few years ago is a classic example of the genre.

Photo courtesy Mark Hillary

Being at Wembley today was like being surrounded by an avalanche of social objects. Which is where my mind turned to as I headed home on the train. And when I got home, what do I find in my twitter stream but a reminder of Hugh MacLeod’s excellent post some time ago, on social objects being the future of marketing. I could not possibly write about social objects without making reference to Hugh, and to Jyri Engestrom, the originator of the term; the two of them have really helped me think about this area.

I know, I’ve linked to quite a few posts already, all dancing around the theme of sharing. If all you do is to read those posts, then it’s been worth my while writing this one.

And for those who’d like to venture further, here’s where my head is at.

1. For anything to be social, it must be shared. The essence of “social” is in sharing. It doesn’t matter what you’re sharing: food, views, experiences, journeys, cars, computers, beds, whatever. It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that sharing swing.

2. Sharing, the act of making social, happens because people are made social. No man is an iland. [I couldn’t resist the temptation to link to Joan Baez’s reading of the Donne poem Meditation XVII, I’m a big fan of both]. People were born to share. Even something as apparently “individual” as identity is a concept steeped in sharing, in being part of a social environment. [This post on identity, written six years ago, may help you think about why].

3. Sharing is encouraged by good design. It’s easy to share meze. It’s a lot harder to share steak. Meze is designed to be communal, to be shared. I have some very close friends in New York, they live on the Upper West Side. And when we meet as families, we make every effort to eat at Carmine’s. They say their family style restaurant is legendary, and for good reason. It is. Family style. Designed to be shared.

4. When you share physical things like food, sharing reduces waste. You need less to go around. There’s a sort of portfolio effect in place, so when you have large groups eat at places like Carmine’s, you tend to leave less food on the plate and on the serving dishes. [Perhaps not the first time around, as you learn to cope with “legendary” helping sizes; but then the waste is a function of poor estimation, not poor design.]

5. When you share non-physical things like ideas, sharing increases value. As George Bernard Shaw is reputed to have said:

photo courtesy Wikipedia

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have an apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

 

Sharing is serious business.

Very serious business.

And sharing has very serious consequences for business, especially if your business is modelled on not-sharing.

When people share physical things, they need fewer of them. And the net effect is to reduce the overall size of the market. Ever wondered why hardware manufacturers don’t like talking about the cloud, preferring to use terms like “private cloud”? Because a private cloud is a data centre under another name. An expensive, private, data centre. Ever wondered why some software companies also emphasise the need for “private clouds”? Why they use every excuse under the sun (and a few more suited to moonlight and darkness) to defend against the cloud? Simple. Because their licensing models are tightly coupled with the hard, physical, “analog” market of hardware and processor. There endeth the lesson.

Non-physical things have been shared for aeons, long before the digital age. Take the insurance market. Today you can contract to cover or protect against many types of risk; the insurance market exists to let you do this, ostensibly for peace of mind, ostensibly a sign of being prudent with your assets. But there was a time when the bearer of the risk was your community, a time when the premium you paid was participation in that community. If your house burnt down, your neighbours got together, sheltered and fed you, then worked with you to help you start over. There was a time when adults didn’t contract with their employers or their insurance companies for their pensions. They already had solid pension schemes: children.

I have never seen an assisted-living/retirement development/old-people’s-home/whatever you want to call it in India. Perhaps they exist. But I had never even heard of one during my time there, from 1957-1980.

Progress. Strange, the things we do in the name of progress.

[This train of thought always reminds me of the dialogue between Mahatma Gandhi and a journalist. When asked what he thought of Western civilisation, he is said to have replied “I think it would be a good idea”.]

People, we live in challenging times. Times when we need to be good stewards of the resources we have. Times when we have to ensure we don’t waste resources. Times when we have to learn to be less selfish. Times when sharing becomes more important, when the ability to share becomes crucial.

Whatever you’re doing, whatever you’re thinking about, whatever you’re faced with, remember who we are. Or, as friend Hugh MacLeod put it:

Remember who you are.

 

According to knowyourmeme, poker face is a “4pane exploitable series illustrating mostly awkward and sometimes embarrassing social situations, who always responds with a blank expression and a caption that reads “poker face”.

This post is not about the meme.

In other news, Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta had a hit song with that title. Which gives me a reason to link this blog to MySpace for the first time ever. And possibly the last. Here’s the Lady Gaga song video.

This post is not about the Lady Gaga song either.

It’s simpler than all that. This post is loosely about signals and about the absence of signals, about what the game of poker calls tells and poker faces.

We signal all the time. And we’ve been doing it ever since there’s been a “we” here to do the signalling.

Some of the signals are to do with our past activity. Fingerprints and footprints are classic examples. But they extend beyond that, we tend to leave all kinds of evidence about who we are and what we did: stray hairs, tiny bits of fabric from our clothes as they snag here and there, traces of dirt from our shoes. Lipstick and saliva and lip-prints on things we touch with our mouths: drink glasses, cigarettes, people. Whole libraries of detective fiction and police procedurals have been woven around the trails of evidence we leave behind, and whole new libraries, with similar tomes, await us. DNA profiling is becoming more common now.

Some of the signals look beyond the past and impinge upon our present and future; they are to do with our current state and used to project what happens next. The detritus in our mouths, the bacteria in our colons, the contents of our stomachs, the nature of our urine and stool, our blood, biopsies of parts of our bodies, patterns in our retinas, all these are used as signals to help determine, amongst other things, our health and wellbeing. These signals are more complex, harder to interpret, harder to get right.

Some of our signals are only decoded after we die. Postmortems, forensic autopsies and clinical autopsies tell us so much about our last meals, our last years, how we lived, how we died. As we’ve understood more about our genes, we’re learning more about our ancestors, who they were, where they lived, how they lived, how they died. Some of our signals are more fleeting, evanescent. Facial expressions (as in the tells of poker players), body language. How we behave when we tell the truth. How we behave when we lie. Attempts have been made to measure and interpret all these for some time now, and they’ll get better.

Now, with the advent of smart mobile tools, we’re now sending more signals, richer signals, signals wrapped in the metadata of context.

Who we are. Where we are. What time of day the signal refers to. Who we’re with. What we’re doing. These signals are tense-free, they span time. We’re signalling what we did, what we’re doing, what we intend to do. Past, present and future. More and more everyday things are now capable of sensing and sharing information: our phones, our computers, our cars, our cameras, our shoes, our clothes. And we’re not the only ones doing the signalling. Our friends tell the world who they’re with, what they’re doing, what they did, what they intend to do. So information about us continues to emanate even if we stop.

For decades our spending habits have been collected, analysed and acted upon by credit card companies; how often have you seen films or read books where people have been tracked down by the plastic trail? Affinity cards took things even further; e-commerce made a fine art of it; mobile “apps” took this to the nth degree. We’ve been leaving the spoor of our history, activities and intentions for aeons.

But there’s one major difference: The barriers to entry have been lowered. Dramatically.

In the old days it took an expert to figure things out. You needed specialist trackers to inspect and learn from spoor. Psychologists. Coroners. Autopsy technicians. Fingerprint experts. You needed the support of the legal system, formal warrants or court orders to inspect call records and credit cards. Nowadays, many of the trails we leave behind are trails accessible to all and sundry. Not everyone knows who can see your trails. Not everyone knows what can be done with those trails. Surprises are being sprung, errors are being made. And they will continue as we learn more about the new environment.

It’s baby and bathwater time. We must make sure we hold on to what’s important.

All these signals allow patterns to emerge. Patterns that will allow us to solve problems that no previous generation could solve. Patterns that can be seen only because of the tools this new paradigm represents. We’re already seeing nanotechnology inside the human body, telling us more about what’s happened and what’s happening; we’re already learning about the power of collective information, even in simple tools like wheresgeorge and its use for predicting viral behaviour in large populations. You should look at the work of Tom Malone, Sandy Pentland et al at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence if you’re interested in this subject.

Making sense of these signals is not always easy. We’re going to need better visualisation tools, better search and find tools, better analytics, better frameworks to operate within. Better frames of reference.

These frames of reference are often comprised of “static” and “low-volatility” data. Names. Addresses. Part numbers. SKUs. Company names. Product names. Bus route and train route and car route and plane route naming conventions. Mapping of names of things to locations. [This is where services like Foursquare are doing the world a real service, by encouraging the labelling of GPS locations in digital maps.].

The static elements are often augmented and enriched by “public” data, data paid for out of the public purse. Ordnance survey maps. Temperatures. Weather. Climate conditions. Traffic status. Bus and train timings. Census information. Usually funded by taxpayer money, usually not “personally identifiable”. Which is where the Open Data movement comes in. There is so much that can be discovered and learnt just by linking different data sources across common reference points, performing the simplest of mashups. But only if the common reference points are accessible. And only if the enriching is done. Tim Berners-Lee has spoken about the value of this for some time now. Nigel Shadbolt, Wendy Hall et al have been doing a lot of work in helping make this happen, helped along by their colleagues Jim Hendler and Noshir Contractor at the Web Science Trust.

There’s more enriching that can be done, as the private sector learns to share its reference and static and low-volatility data (again avoiding that which is personally identifiable).

The problems we face are problems that need us to work collectively, using tools fit for purpose, encouraging sharing, allowing each of us to act like individual and sophisticated sensors, aggregating the data we collect, placing the data in the reference context, augmented by public and private open data. Climate change. Disease control. Sustainable agriculture. Better nutrition and diet. Provision of adequate drinking water. The list is endless. Problems we’ve faced for a long time, problems that have grown in urgency over the last fifty years.

 New problems. New paradigms. New tools.

And new risks.

• People are concerned about how their privacy is affected.
• People are concerned about the long-term consequences of impulsive and stupid actions, the trails of which are forever crystallised in the modern context.
• People are concerned about how quickly and cheaply the trails can be disseminated, and the psychological impact of all that.
• People are concerned about the opaqueness of it all; they used to know who gathered what information for what purpose; now, in this free-for-all world, they know less and less. This asymmetry worries them.
• People are concerned about how all this is gamed. False signals, false tells. Checking in where you’re not. Providing feedback on places you’ve never been.

People are concerned.

And for good reason.

Of course legislation can help and should help, but the issues are global and our ability to get cross-border agreement on the relevant areas is, shall we say, somewhat poor. Nonexistent. Which means we run the risk of well-meaning-but-not-fit-for-purpose legislation in regional pockets while people jockey for position, something we can ill afford.

We’re in pioneering times. And pioneers often make tremendous sacrifices on behalf of the generations to follow.

Marie Curie died of aplastic anaemia. Her condition was caused by the time she spent exposed to radiation.

Jonathan Edwards, the theologian, volunteered to be inoculated against smallpox while the vaccine was still in development, and died as a result.

William Bullock invented the rotary printing press, only to die of gangrene after his foot was crushed by the machine he invented.

There are many many more; here’s a sample list of inventors killed by their own inventions.

Some of the people alive today will pay personal prices, sometimes punitive prices, sometimes the ultimate price, for the progress we seek to make.

This is why education is of paramount importance, so that people learn about the new world, its possibilities and its risks, the benefits and the consequences.

An informed population, ubiquitously connected, empowered with smart devices, will transform global health, education and welfare.

Educated and well people will be able to spend time figuring out where their happiness lies, what it is based on.

And that’s why I write what I write.