Author: JP

Today, 10th March. Roll back 130 years. 1876. That was when Alexander Graham Bell uttered the words in the title to his assistant Mr Watson, and thereby made what many believe to be the world’s first successful telephone call. Bell’s journal records his response: “To my delight he came and declared that he had heard and understood what I said.”. Here’s the actual entry:

Thanks to the Library of Congress, you can riffle through the rest of the journal here.

I was a kid when I first heard about that call, and it excited me. It still excites me. The ability to transmit speech is a wondrous thing.

That’s why I work for BT. Because I want to work with people who believe that. People who get out of bed believing that the ability to communicate using voice is something special. People who go to bed believing that the ability to communicate using voice is something special.

Every day, when I come in to work, I see this plaque outside the building:

Last summer I visited Bologna for the first time. A beautiful city with miles and miles of porticos, a very pleasant “walking” city that I look forward to revisiting. While I was there, I found out that the city housing the Western world’s oldest university, the city that gave us ragu alla Bolognese and mortadella, also gave us Guglielmo Marconi. So I had to make a point of visiting the university and seeing the library there.

I happen to live in the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead; serendipitously, when visiting Cookham Rise many years ago, I found out that Marconi had lived there. And that excited me.

A decade ago, I had the opportunity to invite Marty Cooper to speak to us at an in-house conference. And it excited me to hear about the call he made to Joel Engel, what became the world’s first mobile phone call.

You may get the impression that I was fascinated by wireless when I was a child. You would be right. And I continue to be fascinated by the possibilities afforded us by wireless communications.

I am particularly fascinated by the space where voice and wireless intersect in a digital world. That’s why Ribbit (and its predecessor, Web21C)  excites me so much.

There was a time when we had analog image. Take shots using analog film. Develop film. Print film. Sometimes even write something about the photo on the back of the print.

That print was static. It could be enlarged, retouched, altered, shared. But not easily. Today, image is digital. You take a photograph. It’s auto date- and time-stamped, geolocated. A large amount of metadata about the image is made available cheaply. Take a look at this example taken from Ryan Eng’s photostream on Flickr:

If you visit this particular photograph in Flickr, then just under the “taken with a Nikon D90” statement is a link to More Properties. Which gives you this, and more:

That which has happened to image is happening to voice. It’s getting Tivo-ised. You can do things to voice that you could never do before. You can do things with voice that you could never do before. You can do things because of voice that you could never do before.

The possibilities are tremendous. Outcomes that affect our daily lives worldwide. In education, something I’m personally very committed to. In healthcare. In our business processes. And, most importantly, as human beings, as friends, as family. That’s why I wrote the Kernel For This Blog the way I did, years before I joined BT.

People talk to people. As the Cluetrain guys said, markets are conversations.

That’s why I get excited about the world’s first telephone call 130 years later. That’s why I get excited about coming to work. Even though times are hard. Because I have the privilege of working on things that I’m passionate about.

Incidentally, one of the things that excites me is the very ability to do this. Write this post. Link to the references. Publish it to all and sundry. In a readable, shareable, commentable, enrichable form. With tools that allow me to make this post persistent, archivable, searchable, retrievable.

These changes that are taking place, they’re not minor. It’s 38 years since the first e-mail message, 36 years since the first mobile phone call. Yet for many these things are only just embedding into the public consciousness. We still have a long way to go to figure out what can be done with voice as it turns into a digital object, a social object that happens to be digital.

People have been speaking to people for a long time. But now they have tools that extend the possibilities of speech in ways nobody thought of before. And I’m excited to be somewhere where people care about these things. And are talented enough to do something about it.

[Why 99.94? To commemorate Don Bradman’s Test average. Don would have been 101 last month.]

Here’s what I’m reading right now:

• Fool by Christopher Moore
• Discover Your Inner Economist by Tyler Cowen
• The Automatic Detective by A Lee Martinez
• Network by Clay Spinuzzi
• Sewer, Gas and Electric by Matt Ruff
• The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel
• I, Fatty by Jerry Stahl
• Church Shift by Sunday Adelaja
• Putt’s Law and the Successful Technocrat by Archibald Putt
• In Defence of Economic Growth by Wilfred Beckerman

Why do I share this? Three reasons.

One, because some of you ask me for this regularly. When I complete the blog makeover I will have some sort of library widget in the sidebar so that this process becomes easier. But then again it will stop me writing about the books, which could be a bad thing.

Two, because I will discover other people to read as a result of your comments and guidance. Posts like this one tend to attract comments along the lines of “If you’ve read this you must….” and “If you like her then you should…”.

Three, because it makes me think about my current reading portfolio, see the wood for the trees. I am not always aware of the ten books I’m reading.

Let me know which ones you’re interested in and I will “review” them once I finish reading them.

From a recent McSweeney’s: Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition). Sarah Schmelling’s done a great job taking Hamlet and rewriting it as if it occurred as a series of events reported in your Facebook News Feed. Here’s an excerpt:

There’s something for all of us to learn in all this. For some time now, I’ve been taking events at work and “modelling” them as a series of tweets or as a series of events in a news feed. Not because it’s cute or clever or anything like that. But because it makes you think about the events. What was material about them. What was worth sharing. What would be useful and valuable to others.

Imagine you were asked to provide input into a time capsule that would be opened in a hundred years. What would you put into it?

Now imagine you were asked to provide input into a time capsule that would be opened in a year. A month. A day. Get my drift?

Every now and then, you read reports about a house that has been untouched since Victorian times. A kitchen that has been preserved in 1950s fashion, with real bits. A lounge or sitting room that’s authentically Sixties. The magic is in the mundane. Because that’s how people live. Talking, cooking, eating, cleaning, sleeping, watching, reading, running, listening, snoring, ironing, lazing.

Just a thought.

[My thanks to Anant for the tip-off].

I’m one of those soppy sentimental types who had “a football in his throat” and cried when watching Love Story in the early 1970s. I’m the kind of person who enjoyed listening to Herman’s Hermits. I can remember going to the cinema to see Mrs Brown You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter with my brother in 1968 and loving it. I still enjoy listening to No Milk Today, My Sentimental Friend, I’m Henry the Eighth I am, There’s a Kind of Hush, just to name a few of their songs.

And “I’m Into Something Good”.

Which brings me to the point of this post.

Many years ago I remember reading a book called “Tip On a Dead Crab” by William Murray. Great title, and a pretty good book as well. The thesis behind the title was simple: You took a bunch of crabs with numbers on their backs, put them into a basket, then unloaded the basket near a stake. The crab nearest the stake after a minute was the winner.

Why did I find this fascinating? Because until then I lived with the received wisdom that gamblers wanted to know about guaranteed losers, not winners. A tip on a winner meant nothing; what you wanted was a tip on a loser: a horse that was going to be pulled, a dog that had been nobbled, a team that was going to throw the game.

The theory ran like this: Claiming that something was going to win was worth nothing; everyone would say that. But claiming that something was going to lose, that was different. It was useful information, you could bet on the best of the remainder of the field. If the field only had two in it (like in soccer or boxing) even better.

So the best tips were about losers, not winners. Except when it came to dead crabs.

Sometimes, when I see what’s going on around me, I get the feeling that too many people think that way. That the best tips are about losers. And as a result, everyone’s a critic. What a shame.

Even when I was young, I never really enjoyed criticising people. I was happy to use my feet and vote my feelings that way. If I didn’t like someone I didn’t have to spend time with them. If the food at a restaurant was bad I didn’t have to go there again. If a film wasn’t worth watching I could walk out and not recommend it to anyone.

Now, as I’ve grown older, I fail to see the point in criticising people. We all have beams to cast out of our own eyes before we get involved with the motes in others’ eyes. So why criticise them? Why don’t we build them up instead?

When it comes to reviewing things like books and films and music, why don’t we spend time telling people about the things we liked, rather than spend a great deal of time trashing the things we didn’t like?

It’s easy to criticise. Much harder to say good things. Good things about a person, a novel, a song, whatever. Particularly good things about a person.

We all use phrases like “constructive criticism”, yet too often that translates to “we’re cool about dishing it out but not okay about taking it”.

Of course criticism can be useful, especially when provided constructively and as part of a relationship of trust and openness. In places where trust has broken down, of course there is a place for a different form of criticism: whistleblowing. Of course generalisations are odious.

But.

What would the world be like if we spent time encouraging each other rather than the opposite? Think about it.

You rarely see advertisements that extol the bad things about a product. Ads are about recommendations. This isn’t wrong per se. The wrongness comes from the fact that the recommendation is being made by that which is being recommended in the first place, so there’s a bias.

Endorsements are a little better, but only a little. Tiger Woods may know a lot about golf, but that doesn’t mean I have to trust his brand of consultant.

In the age of television, in a broadcast paradigm, all this was understandable. But in the age of the internet, in a network paradigm, it is no longer so.

We keep getting told that the new world is about recommendations. In a world that revolves around recommendations, the absence of a recommendation is telling. So if you don’t like something or someone, just withhold your recommendation. There is no need to criticise.

I want the people I trust to tell me what’s good, not what’s bad. Telling me what’s bad is easy, everyone does it. The scarcity that I’m prepared to pay for is to be found in the good things, in the people who can tell me about good things.

Take Kirkus Reviews. When it comes to books, I really value their views and comments. But I don’t go looking for the reviews that pan books. Instead, I spend time searching for the books they recommend, particularly those that receive “starred reviews”.

Take Christianity. The etymology for “evangelism” is about sharing good news, not bad.

I want to know about the plumber who turned up on time and did the job well, the restaurant that dazzled, the song that made hearts sing, the book that couldn’t be put down, the film that was spellbinding.

I want to know what’s good, not what’s bad. In the age of advertising, the brand was meant to do this. In the age of the internet, the personal microbrand (as I’ve heard Hugh describe it) can do this, but only if it is made up of unbiased recommendations.

There’s a lot of noise out there. There’s an abundance of gossip, of opinion, weighted towards the bad. Who’s bad. What’s bad.

In the early days of the Web, everyone used the tool to talk about the bad. Criticising, ranting, flaming, outing. Whatever.

More and more I tune out the bad stuff. I’m interested in the good. Life’s too short.

[And if you feel like, you can criticise this post and call me Utopian or whatever :-)]

Update: I just love Gapingvoid’s latest print-to-be: Ordered it straightaway. Why? Because I’m into Something Good.