Category: Four pillars

One of the more unusual things I’ve noticed about the blogosphere is the way that discrimination disappears. The people I read, the people I link to, the people who read this blog, whatever cut I choose, everything seems to level out. Barriers to entry are low, and, despite recent blogosphere events, threats to personal space are also low. This is something enterprises strive to do, yet it happens naturally on the blogosphere. The power of volunteers.

Maybe that’s why the concept of unconferences really caught on. Not because people wanted to rebel against the establishment per se, but because the traditional conference process had the traditional discriminatory walls built in.

BTW, the kernel for this post was a comment by Hazel on a recent cricket post of mine. And here’s something I couldn’t do before, point Hazel towards a knitting blog that I’ve visited a few times, one that appears to be received well. While I’ve never met the author of the blog, we have a connection. Children at the same school. How did I find out? Conversation over dinner with other parents whom we’re close to.

So there’s something else that blogs help me do. Connect people I’ve never met with people I’ve never met.

It’s been a great week for me, a week where I could connect with old college friends while they were playing a reunion gig thousands of miles away. Yes it could have happened with snail mail or telephone, but it didn’t. It happened because of blogs. [Thanks, Chukti. It was great to be able to speak to Bertie and Fuzz, though I missed Mel].

Update:

Saw this, serendipitously, via Boing Boing:

Multiple surveys confirm that females outnumber males online in the US, with “no significant gender gap in internet usage”.

I believe Pew was signalling this anyway, but I’d be interested in seeing the statistics about gender or age or nationality and their relationships with blogs. Dave the LifeKludger has made the point of the enfrachising power of the web before, and powerfully.

I often get asked why I blog, and you’ve seen enough of my answers before. And it’s strange, how someone’s eyes glaze over when I come to the bit where I say “and I learn from my blog, from the comments people leave”. It’s the sort of look reserved for people who say “I read Playboy for its literary content”….

I guess it’s hard to explain to people who don’t blog, how one can learn from blogging. It’s not just about shaping and refining ideas, you also learn to find things, to see things you wouldn’t have seen otherwise, even to do things. Here’s an offbeat example. David Butler, who shares my passion for cricket, commented recently on a cricket-related post of mine. Later on, Dominic Sayers, another cricket-mad friend, left a comment that included a video clip of a Tendulkar catch. And David, while thanking Dom for pointing him towards the Tendulkar clip, made reference to a Johnny Dyson catch. He had no idea when, where and against whom the catch was, or for that matter who the batsman was.

All I did was to Google “johnny dyson catch cricket” and there it was on YouTube and Google Video and in a few other places.

Now I wanted to do something else. I wanted to find a way of sharing videos via my blog, quickly, easily, and without caring about whether it was on YouTube or Google Video or anywhere else. I wanted a level of independence from the “content carrier”. And I wanted it in a way that it didn’t dominate the blog post, a sidebar route.

Which got me looking around for something, and I found VodPod. Seemed to fill the bill, so I went and signed up and found out how to put it on my blog and so on.

A few days ago, I had dinner with Sean, another close friend and blogger. For some reason or the other I made reference to that video, and he hadn’t seen it. I remember thinking to myself, why can’t I have a LibraryThing or last.fm for video clips? VodPod goes some of the way, but I’me sure it can improve. Anyway, it gives me the chance to point towards the Web 2.0 video again, for Sean. Which I will do, shortly.

David, it looks like the batsman was Sylvester Clarke. Can’t remember another Clarke from the West Indies around Dyson’s time, but I could be wrong.

Nice to see friend and erstwhile colleague Nigel start blogging externally, gently wondering about the markets that are mushrooming around the Global Warming theme. Welcome, Nigel.

It’s getting more and more fashionable to buy an opensource company. Quite often, the buyer is a closed-source company.

For about a decade I earned a living as a salesman, selling software services. And when I started, I remember being told “a salesman is only as good as his next sale”.

I think that something similar needs to be said about opensource companies. Their value is not in the IP they produced in the past; instead, it vests in the IP they will produce in the future. Which is why the community is important. I am aware that a very small number of people really contribute to an opensource project, any opensource project; but what they contribute becomes valuable because of the community.

No community, no value. Caveat emptor.

I said I would revert to the theme with which Dan Farber ended his opensource post: the inevitability of hybrids.

Why are hybrids inevitable? I think it all boils down to what Stephen Smoliar and Gordon Cook have been talking about recently, both in the shape of comments here as well as in their own blogs. [Blogs overlap and underlap all over the place, like real conversations….].

States and Transitions.

Many of us know where we want to go, but the path is not yet clear. We know what today represents. We know what tomorrow should look like. But we struggle with the in-between.

That in-between, the transition, tends to have three characteristics

1. Everyone’s Entitled to My Opinion

Polarisation: Opinions get polarised. Everything is about Big Ends versus Little Ends. Blefuscu Redux. Proprietary versus open. Petrol versus electric. VHS versus Betamax.

2. You say Tomahto, I say Tomayto

Meme battles: The battle switches to ideas and terms as we strive to make sense of it all. The language gets less civil, more intense, as passions move past simmering point. When words are the only weapons the air tends to get its own tinge of blue.

3. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose

While 1 and 2 are going on, with each side battling in glorious technicolor, the world carries on. And pragmatic people build pragmatic business models and exchange pragmatic value.

We’re all part of this ecosystem. It is said that each plant has its own specific parasite and its own specific pest, that famines were caused by people who carried plants to far-off lands without the apposite pest-parasite pairing. It’s not always clear what our roles are, who the pest is, who the parasite is. Maybe some of us who blog are pests. Maybe the media that feeds on our doings are parasites. Whatever it is, the outcome can and should be a healthy plant.

Hybrids represent transition. And some process of natural selection, as different hybrid strains battle it out for top slot; some atrophy and die, some adapt and survive.

So we have hybrids.

An aside. Hugh Macleod had this to say in a recent post. Over 95% of all Microsoft revenues come from their partners.

Think about it. What keeps the ecosystem going? Who is the pest? Who is the parasite? And is the plant healthy as a result?

Distribution channels are partners. Ecosystem members are partners. Customers are partners.

As we move from proprietary to open worlds, we are seeing another transition. The customer is becoming the partner. And not a day too soon.