Category: Four pillars

An update on the recent xkcd.com cartoon, which I blogged about earlier today. As FND reminded me, and as reported here and earlier here, its very existence changed the context of the numbers it represented. Given it was Randall Munroe, I guess we should call that the Heisenblag Principle.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been reading Scared To Death by Christopher Booker and Richard North. So you’d understand why I could not help but smile when I saw Randall Munroe’s latest over ca at xkcd:

First of all, thanks for your comments on my previous post, where I posed the question on Digital Dunbar numbers. The views espoused helped me understand a little more about the area, led me down a few new garden paths, and led to a place where I could crystallise a little more of my own thinking of the subject.

Let’s start with my assertion that in a digital world, we can deal with bigger Dunbar numbers: not trivially bigger, but potentially multiple times bigger. Which is why I said I think I have a Dunbar number of around 300 right now.  Why do I think this? Let me try and explain in my normal roundabout way.

How do I become friends with someone else? Usually it follows some sort of pattern. I start with not knowing the other person.  We meet by spending time doing something or the other together, some narrow single-dimensional activity. Like work. A shared hobby, like contract bridge or billiards or folk music. A regular habit, like going to church, or the local pub. A common sport, like golf or squash.

The narrow single-dimensional activity can therefore be a source of new friends. But contact does not make friendship. What happens is that we spend time doing something together, and while we spend this time together, we get to know each other. Unintrusively. That’s important. Unintrusively.

This getting to know each other is actually a subtle discovery of some simple likes and dislikes, common interests, differences, habits and styles. And every now and then something happens, nothing you can describe easily. It’s not mechanical, not calculated, not planned, not predictable. You decide to do something else together. Share a meal, go to a movie. Meet each other’s families. Go to a poetry reading. Play golf. Something other than the activity that brought you together in the first place.

And so this narrow single-dimensional relationship starts widening. Becomes multidimensional. And again, every now and then, something happens, nothing you can describe easily. The ships that passed in the night decide to anchor closer together. And you become friends. Sometimes, again for no apparent reason, you stay friends for life.

Is that the way you see friendships happening?

I’ve never “planned” friendships, nor really tried to analyse what happens, so this is fresh ground for me.  It appears that there is an introductory or “meeting” phase, a discovery or “getting-to-know-each-other” phase, and then something much harder, a “keeping-in-touch” phase. Without the keeping-in-touch the friendship withers and dies.

What I see happening in the digital world is this:

There are more meeting places. More markets where conversations take place. Search costs have reduced.

Deep discovery costs have reduced.The cost of discovering similarities and differences and common interests and habits and character is lower. You can find people with similar long-tail interests more easily.

Communications costs are lower; there are also many more ways to keep in touch. So the costs of keeping in touch are lower, and it’s easier to perform the rites of passage.

But all this would have meant nothing except for one more thing. Travel costs have reduced, international barriers have come down, people fly around much more than they used to. This is the catalyst. The catalyst for the capacity to increase Dunbar numbers.

I think I understand why I have a bigger Dunbar number. The digital world helps, but a digital world cannot by itself raise the Dunbar number. I make a point of spending time with people I know in the different cities and countries I visit on business; digital tools help me make this happen.

There’s something beyond this, something that Malcolm Gladwell touched upon in The Tipping Point. Weak interactions matter. Low-intrusion, protecting personal space.

So I think it’s become easier to make friends, easier to stay friends, provided the friendship in the digital world is reinforced by regular real-life meetings. Increased travel and the use of social media makes social interaction more effective, suggesting the possibility of raising the Dunbar number.

Recently Stumbled across these sites and liked them.

Montana Skies, a cello-guitar fusion duet, covering songs ranging from Summertime thru Malaguena to House of The Rising Sun; I particularly liked Gringo Flamenco, which seems to be an original. i’ve VodPodded the last one for your convenience.

And then there’s Pablo Lobato from Argentina, who draws caricatures of people his way, unusually easy to recognise while being original and different. Here’s Pablo’s rendition of Jack Nicholson and The Three Stooges, two favourites of mine (and not just their caricatures). I would go to a performance of Nicholson reading the telephone directory out aloud. For that matter, I would have gone to a performance of Larry, Moe and Curly Joe reading the telephone directory out aloud!

Stumbling can be enjoyable. As long as you keep feeding back what you like.

I’ve been blogging for a while now, and I’ve been delighted with the response. I average around a thousand RSS reader-based subscribers (according to Feedburner), tend to have around 300 unique IP addresses visit me daily (according to ClustrMaps) and get around 7 comments a post. [The IP addresses sometimes understate what is happening, given the number of “institutional” readers I appear to have, but that’s anecdotal and irrelevant unless I try to “monetise” myself…which I won’t do.] I’ve occasionally broken into Technorati’s Top 5000, but spend most of the time range-finding between 8000 and 12000. Alexa does not recognise me, and I think there’s a strange reason: It seems to insist on collecting statistics from people using Internet Explorer rather than any other browser, and that’s apparently bad for my community of readers :-)

This has been a steady pattern for a while, and it’s worked for me. I’ve sensed that I have a Dunbar number of around 300 in the digital world, and I’ve been delighted to find I know most of the steady ones. Over the years I’ve actually met most of the community of readers, usually at conferences. The face-to-face contact, in turn, leads to a deepening of the relationship, and we land up creating and developing links in Facebook and Twitter. [I still land up with a smidgeon of LinkedIn requests, but to be frank the only reason I go to LinkedIn is to deal with Invitations to Connect.]

So when I see a change in the pattern, I wonder. More recently, I’ve seen a surge in the number of readers and commenters, I’ve even met some of the new ones, and there’s something happening. This year, for example, the average number of IP addresses reported by ClustrMaps has doubled. Which leads me to do three things:

One, I want to welcome new readers and ensure that you are aware of what I try and get done via this blog, so I quote the About This Blog piece below. If you want to know more, then please read The Kernel for This Blog, also quoted below.

Two, I want to try and understand where this surge has come from. Three possibilities suggest themselves. (a) people who met me at Le Web, or saw coverage of my chat there; (b) people who’ve connected to me via Twitter, with the possibility that the Twitterverse is less overlapped with the blogosphere than I originally assumed; and (c) that there is some sort of January Effect, and people research and adjust reading habits over the year-end holiday. I would consider this to be a “small-cap blog“, so a January Effect sort of makes sense. So do comment on why you turned up here.

Three, I want to open up a dialogue on digital Dunbar numbers. Those of you who are prepared to do so, please share with the rest of us some of what you see and experience. How many Facebook friends do you have, how many regular readers of your blog, how many followers in Twitter, do you see a correlation between the three, if not why not, and so on. Do you tend to meet a core of this number on a face-to-face basis, if not why not? What other tools do you use, tools such as Dopplr and last.fm and netvibes and so on. Freeform comments are fine, this is not deep research. Just trying to get a sense of what’s happening.

An aside. You guys are a small community of readers, and I’m grateful for the time you give to coming here, and to the comments you write. I thought you’d be amused at your vacation habits, as shown in a recent ClustrMap….. every time people go on holiday, I can see a definite shift in the number of dots in sunny climes, particularly the Caribbean :-). Because the map gets archived at the end of every month, the effect is very visible.

So. As promised. Here’s the About This Blog piece. As usual, comments welcome.

About this blog

I believe that it is only a matter of time before enterprise software consists of only four types of application: publishing, search, fulfilment and conversation. I believe that weaknesses and corruptions in our own thinking about digital rights and intellectual property rights will have the effect of slowing down or sometimes even blocking this from happening.

I believe we keep building layers of lock-in that prevent information from flowing freely, and that we have a lot to learn about the right thing to do in this respect. I believe identity and presence and authentication and permissioning are in some ways the new battlegrounds, where the freedom of information flow will be fought for, and bitterly at that.

I believe that we do live in an age of information overload, and that we have to find ways of simplifying our access to the information; of assessing the quality of the information; of having better tools to visualise the information, to enrich and improve it, of passing the information on.

I believe that Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law and Gilder’s Law have created an environment where it is finally possible to demonstrate the value of information technology in simple terms rather than by complex inferences and abstract arguments.

I believe that simplicity and convenience are important, and that we have to learn to respect human time.

I believe we need to discuss these things and find ways of getting them right. And I have a fervent hope that through this blog, I can keep the conversations going and learn from them.

And here’s The Kernel For This Blog:

Building Society for the 21st Century

Economic models that succeed tend to take advantage of the abundances as well as the shortages that characterise a particular economic era. Traditionally, the primary factors of production used to be land, labour and capital; much of this was in “institutional” rather than individual hands, and as a result, attempts to create efficiencies in the use of these factors tended to create institutional models as a basis for reducing transaction costs.

Land ownership has changed; while governments, churches and firms still own land, there is far more individual ownership of land than ever before. Labour is no longer bonded, and the ability to migrate between firms and even countries has never been greater. Capital is also more mobile, with deregulated markets and dematerialised securities and electronic cash; when many individuals have better credit ratings than the institutions they bank with, the definition of what a bank does changes.

The nature of asset creation has also changed, with intangibles forming a growing proportion of GDP worldwide; we now impute monetary value on talent and skill and knowledge and network and brand and reputation.

The Agricultural Revolution transformed our ability to produce food cheaply; the Industrial Revolution helped us reduce plant and equipment production costs, as well as those of core infrastructure providing heating, lighting and transportation. There were also major demographic and societal changes: barriers based on race and sex began to erode, infant mortality was lowered and people began to live longer.

The Information Age heralded the dawn of a true Services Revolution as human capital grew in importance and communications costs reduced sharply. Technological advances a la Moore, Metcalfe and Gilder continued their relentless march, as price-performance improved, network effects were realised and everybody started getting connected.

Despite major technological advances over the past fifty years or so, one thing has not changed as appreciably: man’s longevity. And, since assets were increasingly based on intangibles, this created, and continues to create, a war for talent. Institutions have found it increasingly difficult to attract, retain and develop talent.

Every institution had to take steps to value and protect human time. Simplicity and convenience became important, “dial-tone” services became important, design and usability mattered. Technology adoption curves became inverted: historically, adoption was driven by those with the largest R&D budgets – defence, aerospace, high-end manufacturing and automobiles, sophisticated capital markets. Products trialled in these sectors slowly drifted towards mainstream commerce and much later towards consumers.

What inverted? The age of the early adopter changed, which moved startlingly from 35-40 years old towards 12-21 years old. When you look at mobile phones, texting, instant messaging, downloads, Skype, the iPod and iTunes phenomena, multifunction devices, the standards for these are all set by youth. And this trend is now moving towards changing the functionality of “established” web firms such as Google and Amazon, eBay and Yahoo.

It was this shift, when youth became the early adopters, which signalled a real change from institutional to individual capitalism; not having been exposed to how organisations worked and not caring about how governments operated, youth began to set the agenda.

Peer respect became more important than the power of hierarchical authority; relationships and trust returned to prominence after a long time in the wilderness; there were no longer any taboos about asking why things were the way they were, and challenging the status quo.

Today is their Sixties. And, in a vicarious way, ours too; The Age of the Individual.

Empowered and free from hierarchy, jealous about personal time, keen on relationships and trust, inquisitive about values and ethics, with the power of the web to change their perceptions of time and distance and organisations and government.
What does this mean for firms and governments? Another inversion. Now, as such institutions fight to hold on to their piece of the talent pool, they realise that historical carrots and sticks have no meaning to the new generation. People migrate to institutions that reflect the values they hold and make it possible for individuals to make a difference. “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” has subtly shifted. Do ask what your country/company will allow you to do for them, before choosing.

This is not as shocking as it sounds. We already have odd critical masses developed over the years, such as shipping registration in Panama or company incorporation in Delaware or high-net-worth individuals domiciled in tax havens. It has been suggested that European IPOs grew as a result of Sarbanes-Oxley, as new entrants railed against increased regulation.
Human beings can now withhold their talent, their time, and their taxes, in ways that could not have been imagined before. Flash mobbing and IM and texting and blogs and wikis and video allow people to communicate in ways we could not have foreseen. The assembly-line approach that characterised our schools, hospitals, companies and governments is failing, as people choose to be different. Any colour you like, so long as it’s black, does not rule any more.

Assembly line approaches focus on consolidating volume and ensuring homogeneity, low standard deviation and uniformity. All citizens the same. All students the same. All the same.

The web is about diversity, individuality, personal-ness. People want to be connected, not channelled, to choose their experiences and to co-create them with peers they respect and trust.

As innovation democratises, and open-source ideas get shared and enriched and mutated, people behave differently. Diversity is no longer suppressed but celebrated.

We used to hate looking at someone else’s holiday movies and snapshots, but now we love Flickr. Why? Because we choose the time and place. Connected, not channelled.

Alumnus gatherings didn’t always work and were often lifeless, now they’re Friends Reunited. Why? Because we have transparency of information, simpler ways to discover the who and the where, and choice as to the relationships we grow. Connected, not channelled.

We choose the schools we go to, the courses we take at university, the firms we work for, the countries where we live, what we do with our time. When we work and when we sleep. We choose our relationships and who we spend time with. Connected, not channelled.

As the Cluetrain guys said, markets are conversations. They do not happen hierarchically. Even our Assembly Line software applications have disaggregated. All we have left is subscriptions to syndicated content, heuristically enhanced non-deterministic search, support for fulfilment and a framework to enable trust and collaboration.

Governments and firms are left feeling helpless, as central control diminishes and the power of the individual rises, and they need to recognise that bell curves now have very long tails.

As these changes come about, with individual capitalism and the subversion of institutions, we need new business models. What should these models do?

One, make a clear stance on values and ethics.

Two, allow relationships and collaboration to take place, rather than control the relationships.

Three, intermediate to enable trust and fulfilment rather than channel towards lock-in.

Four, recognise that the customer wants to create and co-create value rather than just receive.

Use what you stand for to attract the customer. Use what you do to retain the customer’s trust. Ensure that the customer is always free to leave, and paradoxically he or she will stay. Who is this customer? Your family. Your friend. Your employee. Your business partner. Your client. Your citizen.

In a world of empowered individuals, everyone’s a customer.

There are barriers in the way, and serious ones at that. There is a need to overhaul everything to do with Intellectual Property Rights, be they patents or trademarks or copyright or DRM or whatever. There is a need to avoid over-regulation, the creation of bad law driven by institutional values. This is particularly true for every form of communication, affecting big media, telcos, “content producers”, and the publishing industry in general.

This is going to be difficult, and often humorous, since these are tremendous changes. Witness what happened to Sony’s DRM or Hollywood’s attempts to send copies of Munich to the BAFTA judges. Witness what happened to Skype.

Connected, not channelled.

I wrote both About This Blog as well as The Kernel for This Blog a few years ago; my views remain the same. Your views will help me learn how to do what I want to do, better and faster.