Category: Four pillars

On A-Lists and Linking to New Bloggers and The Intention Economy

Some time ago I was doing my usual wander around the blogosphere, and was passing through Scobleizer via Gapingvoid, when I saw this quote by Scoble, on some of the recent Techmeme noise:

  • Are you worried about the elitism of A-List jerks like me?
  • Then freaking link to new bloggers that we haven’t heard about yet!

Couldn’t agree more. It is up to us, the Z-Listers like you and me, to make sure that people who need to be heard and read get heard and read. And this is not to demean A-Listers, it’s not their fault. We made them what they are. I know many people I would consider to be part of that elite community, many who have advised me, challenged me, supported me, criticised me. And guess what? I’ve found many new people to connect to, to read, to talk with, as a result of the advice given to me by that elite.

Being an A-Lister isn’t a crime. Preventing others — from having the opportunity to become one — could, in some people’s eyes, be a crime. I can’t accept that. Every one of us is a participant in that process, it is up to us to keep the blogosphere open to all. And I think it is open to all.

  • I like stumbling around, ever since I came across StumbleUpon, it takes me places I wouldn’t have found any other way.
  • I like taking a look at the blogrolls of people I read, they take me places I wouldn’t have found any other way.
  • I like checking technorati to see who’s linking to me, I get to places I wouldn’t have found any other way.

And when I find someone/someplace I like, I watch for a little while (just to see if they’re active) and then link to them.

Which is what I’m going to do with something I found today.

Some time ago, I’d written a post about the power of Beta. And today, I found someone I hadn’t heard of linking to the post. That someone was the Workstream 3 Draft for Connecting Bristol’s entry to the Digital Challenge.

Now whoever’s behind the Workstream 3 Draft, they’re actually thinking of submitting their blog as the entry. I quote from the blog:

  • I’m going to try and make the most of the other posts here, and links to referenced projects, articles, etc. Wouldn’t it be cool if our submission was this blog, with a front post that summarised everything and then linked to all the supporting posts, comments, etc?

Now that would be cool.

I have always wanted blogs to be the “buy side” of the procurement process, a reasonable extension of the Intention Economy. I could see many benefits. You tell people what you’re looking for. Others come back to you with recommendations. You could recommend yourself or your product/service, but you have to do so in public. And therefore you’re vulnerable. [An aside. It was that vulnerability that really hit me when David Mackenzie introduced Hallam Foe to a small group of bloggers. No place to hide].

But until I saw the Workstream 3 Draft, I’d never considered using blogs on the “sell side” of the process. Shows how dumb I can be.

I love seeing this juxtaposition of virtual and real communities, using virtual as well as real tools to get real things done. Real learning by doing.

So if any of you want to help them, learn from them or just observe, here’s your chance.

Patently bogus

There’s a story in the feedback section of the latest New Scientist about a “lazy inventor trap”; it restored my faith in the stupidity of much of today’s patent processes. No surprise, the story’s hidden behind a paywall.

Why worry when you’ve got Google. I entered the patent application number and there it was. You can read the patent here. But I’ll save you the trouble.

It’s a patent for some form of hybrid between image capture and document, somewhere in the copier and fax space. But that’s not important.

What is important is this clause, which occurs six inches into the front page of the claim:

9. The method of providing user interface displays in an image forming apparatus which is really a bogus claim included amongst real claims, and which should be removed before filing; wherein the claim is included to determine if the inventor actually read the claims and the inventor should instruct the attorneys to remove the claim.

What is important is that the clause was not buried in the small print, it was at the start of the claim.

What is important is that the inventor was meant to have taken the bogus clause out.

What is important is that the inventor didn’t. Nor did his attorney. Nor did the Patent Office. Nor did anyone reading the patest for the last two years.

Just goes to show.

Do patents actually get read?

We have patent spam, and it’s gotten worse. Discovery of prior art is not easy. People game the system.  There are frivolous patents, spurious ones, defensive ones and frankly offensive ones.

Time for a change.

Doc on VRM

Doc’s posted on why he wants VRM. As he says: “This is our problem. We’re the ones in the best position to fix it.” So now I have to find a way to be at the Internet Identity Workshop in a few weeks’ time. It’s a bugbear of mine as well.

Building for the present — all the time

If you’ve been waiting for Parts 3 and 4 of the Filmmaking and Software Development post-series, my profuse apologies. I’m still reading through some of the references people suggested I follow up, and I feel I shouldn’t complete the posts until I’ve read them all. Otherwise I might as well not ask for comments and feedback….]

But in the meantime, I can’t resist moving from Filmmaking to Netflix, while keeping in the Agile space. Especially given the serendipitous bloglike way I got to the Netflix story. I was reading Chris Messina, one of my regular reads, when I came across his post on Photo Matt’s new look. That in turn led me to this story on The Freedom of Fast Iterations, a Joshua Porter post on UIE.com. If you have the time, it’s worth wandering over to Joshua’s blog, Bokardo, where he looks at social web design and related issues.

Back to Joshua’s Netflix post/interview. Read it for yourself, it’s a must for critics of agile. There are some wonderful quotes there, examples below:

  • “We make a lot of this stuff up as we go along,” the lead designer said. Everyone in the group laughed until he continued, “I’m serious. We don’t assume anything works and we don’t like to make predictions without real-world tests. Predictions color our thinking. So, we continually make this up as we go along, keeping what works and throwing away what doesn’t. We’ve found that about 90% of it doesn’t work.”
  • The designers at Netflix told us they try out many new features with every site iteration to keep pace with the rapidly changing landscape of the Web, as well as their customers’ increasing comfort with the current site. Much of what they do try doesn’t survive to the next iteration.So how often does Netflix update its site? Every 2 weeks. Every 2 weeks they make significant changes. They understand that some of the changes will work, but most won’t.
  • At first, this sounds like a frustrating design constraint. In talking with the team, we realized that it doesn’t frustrate them at all. Instead, it frees them up to be flexible and adaptive, so they can react effectively to customer needs. As a result, they don’t deal with the many “when we redesign” issues that so many of us deal with in the design world. They’re building for the present — all the time.

I love those quotes.

  • Building for the present — all the time. If I wanted a mantra for fast iteration, that would be it.
  • It frees them up to be flexible and adaptive, so that they can react effectively to customer needs. Anything that makes you more responsive to customer needs is a must-do nowadays.
  • We don’t assume anything works and we don’t like to make predictions without real-world tests. As an economist-turned-accidental-technologist, you don’t know how happy I am to see those words.

The post goes on to enumerate some benefits of fast iteration:

  • Fail Fast
  • More Experimentation
  • Learn Quickly
  • Provide Continuing Interest
  • Reduced Risk

They’re worth a read, but I guess most of you have come across similar lists before. What is unusual, however, is the list that follows, headlined Side Effects:

  • Culture Change
  • Design Determinism
  • You’re Either With Us

These are bang on the money. Read it, read the whole post and see for yourself.

On VCs and Products and Services: Another very provisional post

Nic Brisbourne set this particular snowball rolling along, with his comments on one of my recent posts. I’d been talking about a future where increased commoditisation led to there being only one real sustainable differentiator, the customer experience.

One of the things Nic said struck a chord with me. A discordant and jangly one. [And no, that’s not because I’m listening to James Marshall H play Voodoo Child (Slight Return) right now].

Here’s a quote from what Nic has to say:

  • Recently I have been reading a lot about the importance of customer service as a differentiator – Brad puts in this context on the Union Squares blog and JP recently wrote the following:

  • As we move towards realms where more and more things get commoditised, and more quickly at that, it is reasonable to assume that the only aspect of a service offer that differentiates one firm from another is the quality of the customer experience.

  • If this is true it is bad news for venture capital.  Customer service and the customer experience are of course important to get right, but they are more about perspiration than inspiration – and inspiration is where the big money is at.  You wanna be investing in companies that have revolutionary products – like the ones I listed earlier.

Thankfully, Nic doesn’t stop there; he points out that there are many opportunities for innovation that have yet to be exploited, and gives the real-world use of virtual worlds as a good and down-to-earth example [you’re right, I just couldn’t resist describing virtual worlds as down-to-earth :-) ]

But somewhere along the line, the deeper point he makes jarred me into thought.

It’s been 50 years since  the tertiary sector began its explosive growth, so much so that we’ve already had a coupe of services-intensive recessionary cycles. Yet, during all that time, as the VC community we know and love has evolved to what it is today, the reality is that VC investment is still about products.

And now, as we move deeper and deeper into the knowledge economy (often referred to as the quaternary sector, and sometimes even seen as inclusive of the quinary sector, covering pure health, education and welfare services), we could have a problem.

We’re moving into the Because Of Rather than With World, so eloquently described by Doc. Where infrastructure is often built on a Nobody Owns It Everyone Can Use It Anyone Can Improve It world. Where the creativity and innovation of the knowledge worker teams operate on the edge of the core infrastructure. A core infrastructure that used to be a rich vein of gold, but is now a humble spade.
And maybe. just maybe, VCs aren’t prepared for this. Product-based business plans are all about With. You make money With the product. Knowledge-based business plans will all be about Because Of. You make money Because Of the product.

[Doc commented on some of this in a recent Linux Journal post, which you can read here]

Up to now, things have been easy, as Nic describes:

  • Best practice for financing web2.0 style companies has been (for a while now) to:
    • Have an original idea for a new product
    • Quickly launch a rudimentary service
    • Capture feedback as traffic grows to improve the service so creating a virtuous circle (note the winner-takes-all nature of this)
    • Find a way to monetise
  • It is usually only at the third stage of this that money on the venture capital scale is required and companies need less money overall.

There is an argument that suggests that Web 2.0 companies have been creating their own private version of Global Warming, using up more infrastructural resources than they create. Much of the hoopla about Net Neutrality was about some version of this argument.

This is all about perception, the perception that Web 2.0 companies are free-riding on someone else’s infrastructure investment.  And the VC community may well believe that as well, I need to think about it.

If I’m right about this, then one of the unintended consequences of such perception is seen in stupidities such as bad IPR and bad DRM.

Doc and I conversed about this for quite a while in the early summer. How do we fund things that are really Because things? What is the investment model for Because infrastructure?

  • Anyone can see we have a problem
  • Everyone stands to gain if we solve the problem
  • Nobody’s doing anything about it.

We need to solve this. We need to know how to get Because Infrastructure funded. If we don’t do this, we will probably go back to the Dark Ages, where vendor lock-in was common, where everyone paid EAI tax to move information around between prisons, and where, just occasionally, someone succeeded.

We need to solve this. Before Nicholas Carr needs to write another book on the subject.

Any ideas out there?