Category: Four pillars

There’s been a lot of coverage on “monetising” blogs of late, partly catalysed by a Business 2.0 article titled Blogging for Dollars.

So I thought I’d write about something else, something far removed from “monetising”. Things I have been able to do Because Of my blog, rather than With my blog. These are (in no particular order):

1. Connect with long-lost friends I may not have found easily any other way

Chutki Ramaswamy, Deepak Wassan and Devangshu Dutta come to mind. It’s been over a quarter of a century since we were in contact, and yet an active blogosphere makes this possible. More importantly, it makes it happen non-intrusively and low-touch, almost serendipitously; in addition, there is an inherent collaborative filter present, since people who read my blog and comment on it are more likely to be interested in the same things as I am. Which brings me to points 2 and 3.

2. Extend my network with an implicit collaborative filter in place, connecting me with people with similar interests

Sure we can do this with other social-networking software and communities. But I think blogs are a richer, softer, less in-your-face and more accurate form of connection-making; in fact I think the better term is relationship-making, going beyond the connection very quickly. The process is not an automated matching of profiling and preference information, but something far more elaborate. I now have relationships with people I did not know, and have had the good fortune to meet a number of them face to face in places as disparate as Copenhagen and Amsterdam and San Francisco and Boston. And there are many more I will make a real effort to meet in person, because the conversations have been that worthwhile.

3. Use a collaborative filtering process in ways I hadn’t considered before

One of the criticisms levelled against the blogosphere is that it can become a real back-slapping mutual admiration society. [And yet, perversely, one of the biggest criticisms levelled against the same blogosphere is that it’s full of flames and hate and venom. Go figure]. When you’re dealing with ideas rather than people-gossip or events, I think the mutual-admiration aspect is weakened, almost negligible. The people I connect with are people who don’t necessarily share the same views as me, they are people who share the same interests. Important distinction. So we can have pro-Ayn-Randers discussing things with anti-Ayn-Randers, opensource-for-ever thinkers arguing with proprietary-wins-thinkers. And it helps keep me honest in my thinking, because I get to listen to opposing points of view I would not otherwise receive as easily. Which brings me to my next point.

4. Acquire new and different perspectives on things I’m interested in

Whether it’s Clarence Fisher on education or Dave The LifeKludger on kludging through life or taking a different view on what identity means through NextIdentity, a recent commenter, I get to experience a richer learning. People who are doing the job they are commenting on, helping me understand what I’m interested in anyway, but doing it in a way that adds an extra dimension to my learning.

5. Find things I’m looking for

No better example than the photograph I’ve already blogged enough about. But there are many others. Book recommendations that are far more accurate than an Amazon or a Google, because human brains have processed human information prior to making the recommendation. People I should meet, places I should visit, things I should do. All done on a voluntary and (yes it’s that word again) altruistic basis. Which brings me to my last point

6. Learn more about vulnerability and humility

You make yourself vulnerable when you blog, you can’t hide behind titles and walls and what-have-you. Occasionally you get active feedback, through conversation, comments and e-mail. But most of the time you don’t know, and you’re baring your mind. It may not be the case for everyone, but for sure I feel vulnerable when I blog. But I’m relaxed about it, because no relationship of value can exist without that vulnerability in all parts of that relationship. Why humility? Sure I can put on a mock-humble persona and  ask for comments and views while being completely closed to external input. But not for long. People aren’t stupid. You cannot game this. When people you don’t know bother to read what you have to say, that’s one thing. When they take the time and the effort to think about what you say, and respond with views and suggestions and comments, they’re doing this free-gratis-and-for-nothing. I feel privileged to have received the readership and comments I’ve had, because there’s no axe to grind, no business deal in the offing, no hidden agenda.  And I don’t think people will bother to do so if they perceive there’s no real humility. Why should they?

The point of this post is that none of the items on the list above were expected outcomes when I started blogging. They were serendipitous by-products, and wonderful ones at that.

Doc has just put up a great “post’ on Suitwatch; it’s more an article than a post, and Suitwatch’s not a blog, but so what? Subscribe via this link if you want to read it.

Update: You can now read the entire article via this link at Linux Journal.

Let me tempt you with a few tidbits from the story:

Identity is a first-person matter. It comes from the inside, not the
outside. So does everything else we do as individuals. Which is why I’m
not just talking about identity this time. I’m talking about everything
that’s missing in everything we’ve been doing ever since we first started
calling computing “personal”, way back in the late Seventies.

All the identities in our wallets and purses, from social security numbers
to credit card numbers to library and museum memberships, are given to us by
organizations. More importantly, they represent “customer relationship
management” (CRM) systems that at best respect a tiny fraction of who we are
and what we might bring to a “relationship”. What CRM systems call a
“relationship” is so confined, so minimal, so impoverished and so incomplete
that it insults the word.

No matter how “user-centric” we make our CRMs, the fact that we burden the
vendor side with the entire relationship reveals how one-sided and lame the
whole system really is. Also how antique it is, in a time when individuals
are only becoming more empowered by digital technology and networking. It
doesn’t matter how respectful we make “federation” between CRMs of different
companies. The CRM system will remain broken until it appreciates, embraces
and truly relates to customers — not just as complex human beings, but as
entities with many other relationships, and as potential sources of highly
useful intelligence. Not to mention money.

As usual Doc hits the nail on the head.

If we want individuals to be valued, then we must also value those things that make individuals individual. An individual’s Credentials. History. Behaviour. Values. Relationships. Intentions. Even fingerprints and DNA. Whatever that individual wants to share with others. Whomever the individual wants to share with. Whenever and however that sharing is done. At the individual’s behest and choice.
[A number of useful links are also provided, particularly to what Steve Gillmor and his Gang have been doing in this space, as also the work being done by Drummond Reed et al.]

And no, this is not a mutual admiration society of A-listers like Doc and apparent A-lister wannabes like me.

I do not want to see, or be part of, a society that makes “agreeing with someone” a sin. I do not want to see, or be part of, a society that makes “cutting people down to size” and “belittling” someone in a Weakest-Link way something to be admired. What utter tosh.
I want to see, and be part of, a society that encourages people, that provides constructive criticism, that has covenant and not contract relationships, that believes in building people up rather than smashing people down.

Despite the success of opensource, despite everything we have learnt about the way human networks operate, despite everything we have learnt about man’s make-up, drivers and emotional intelligence, I keep meeting people who just cannot accept the concept of altruism.

As far as they are concerned, man was born to be selfish. Period.

There are many such people about. Which makes life interesting for anyone trying to derive value from social software in enterprises; when you talk to them about it, their eyes glaze over, they get the Does Not Compute signal flashing over their foreheads, and they quickly disengage. I’m sure you’ve seen that look a zillion times.
And that is partly why I looked harder at group selection and at emotional intelligence and at the Nohria/Lawrence Four Driver model in Driven.

Today I saw a spark of light, a modicum of understanding, while reading an unlikely source. George Orwell.

I had chanced upon Orwell’s Why I Write monograph while vacationing in the US, but I hadn’t got around to reading it as yet. Until today.

How can you possibly not read a book subtitled “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind” ?

Orwell thinks that there are four great motives for writing that “exist in different degrees for every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living“.

He lists the motives as:

• Sheer egoism
• Aesthetic enthusiasm
• Historical impulse
• Political purpose

It’s not a very long essay, so I shall let you savour it for yourself, save for an expansion of the first motive. He defines sheer egoism as:

• Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc. etc. It is humbug to pretend that this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition — in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, wilful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centred than journalists, though less interested in money.

I have a lot of time for Orwell and his writing, though I don’t always agree with his point of view. Much of the time I do agree with him. But that’s a separate discussion.

Orwell wrote Why I Write towards the end of his life, sandwiched neatly between his two primary successes, Animal Farm and 1984. In 1946, when he wrote the tract, he was only just becoming financially secure for the first time in his life. I am no Orwell expert, but that’s the way it looks to me.

What I find fascinating is the conditioning and worldview expressed by him in that short statement I quoted above, on writing for “sheer egoism”. Here’s my rewrite, obviously biased to help me try and make my point:

• “the whole top crust of humanity” are a bunch of insecure, fame-hungry, selfish, back-stabbingly ambitious people who are “a minority of gifted, wilful people”; “the great mass of human beings”, on the other hand, are fundamentally unselfish, live for each other, setting aside selfish ambition by the time they are thirty and getting on with life.

Winners; and losers.

Orwell obviously saw things that way, in order to have expressed himself the way he did. I don’t think I’ve placed much bias in my interpretation.

This is not about him being right or wrong. Just that even then, there were apparently many people who were comfortable in “dying to self”, who were relaxed about not kicking, biting and scratching their way up the organisation that is life, who were happy to help each other and live for each other. And they were looked down on. For being altruistic and not particularly ambitious.
But that was then. Now, with globalisation and disintermediation and the possibility of universal connectivity and enfranchisement, maybe things have changed.

Maybe the old Winners Losers model based around selfishness and lofty ambition was a Hits model, and maybe we are really moving to a new Long Tail world. Which is not a Hits model, not a Winners Losers model.

And maybe it’s OK to be unselfish and collaborative and not-loftily-ambitious and even altruistic in this Long Tail world.

Just musing. Until I saw Orwell’s words, I never quite realised how bad a press altruism had, how poor a public image being unselfish had.

This puts the altruism-questioners into perspective for me.

My bad. I guess.

In writing my previous post, I really wanted to get the quote from Po Bronson’s Bombardiers right. So first off I looked for the book in my library, and couldn’t find it. Probably packed away already, I’m in the process of moving house. Oh well.
So I thought I’d try Amazon Online Reader. Found the book in Amazon, went to Excerpt, went to Search Inside This Book, and then entered “First Law” as my search term.

Bingo, I got a number of results returned, including the specific one I wanted, on page 81. Which I guess I could have linked to, which is what I have done here.

Seems completely fair use to me; I don’t have many readers, but if even one person buys Bombardiers from Amazon as a result of my post, then that’s one book more worth of revenue than Amazon or Bronson had before I did what I did.

This is me just experimenting on what could be, when everything is scanned and searchable, what Google and Amazon have been trying to do in different ways. The potential in education and in research is amazing.

Of course, there are obvious drawbacks. The population of books scanned is still relatively low. I can’t use highlight or print as yet. When something I want to quote happens to go beyond a page boundary, it is messy from a linking point of view, the physical page concept is deeply ingrained for obvious reasons.

But worst of all, there was no way for me to copy and paste, so the only thing I could do was to swivel-chair engineer it. Read it, memorise it in chunks, type it out. [Yes I know there are other drawbacks, some of which I mention later. Here I am concentrating on drawbacks to existing functionality, rather than missing functionality].
It’s great to be able to do what I’ve been able to do so far, so thank you Amazon. I’ve tried bits of this before, but this was the first time I did so “in anger”. [Wonder how that phrase came about. Must check. Odd].

Unfortunately, since I don’t live in the US, I have not been able to participate in the Amazon Upgrade program. But even if I could have, my understanding is that the program is restricted to books I personally purchased from Amazon directly. [Wry grin as I think about someone who lives in the US but buys books from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de, and how the “system” will cope with that.]

What I would really want is a LibraryThing equivalent where I have a simple way of telling Amazon which books I have, leading up to some recurring fee with low frequency (like an annual season ticket) allowing me to have digital access to all my books; this fee should not care how many books I have, how often I use the service. What I pay for is the software-as-service; the books are mine; the information I generate is mine; but the process by which I transform what I have is something I have to pay for.

Such a service has to, just has to include books I have bought from sources other than Amazon. Cue Dick Hardt and Doc Searls and whose information it is.

The kernel for this post is a comment and a question from Stephen Smoliar on a recent post of mine. [I think this post should come with a health warning on its length and its subject matter. You have been warned :-) ]

Gresham’s Law, simply put, states that Bad Money Drives Out Good.

If there is “Something” commoditised and in circulation, with real and measurable intrinsic value, this “Something” can be replaced by “Something Else” with lower intrinsic value, provided the Something Else has a way of having its artificial value upheld or warranted. Please do look at the linked Wikipedia entry if you are not familiar with the term, rather than rely on any of my mutterings.

Is there a Gresham’s Law for information? Not yet. Could there be a Gresham’s Law for information? There will be, if we let it happen. Should it happen? I think not; I hope not.

My reasons:

• Information, particularly digital information, is an extreme nonrival good
• For digital information to have value, we (the consumers/producers of information) must impute that value to information
  
• That imputation of value should not come from seeking to make an abundant commodity scarce, but from new ways of imputing value to digital information
  
• We already have new ways of imputing value to such information
• The velocity of information is increasing, and traditional responses will not scale
  

We have the power to prevent Gresham’s Law from being applicable to information. It is up to us.

Let me now take each point in turn.

Information, particularly digital information, is an extreme nonrival good.

I quote from Rishab Aiyer Ghosh‘s opening essay in CODE below:

• The economic basis for intellectual property is nonobvious, to say the least. Unlike most forms of property, intellectual property is almost unique in requiring state support for its very existence. While it is helpful to have state protection for a plot of land, it can also be protected by, for instance, putting a fence around it, and a chair can be protected by sitting on it. Such acts of protection express your possession of your property. Information is not just an extreme nonrival good, in that many people can enjoy its benefits at the same time; information is also unusual in that ownership over it cannot be expressed through a public act of possession. You can possess information if you keep it to yourself — in which case it remains private, and nobody knows what it is that you possess. As soon as you make public the information you claim to own, it is public information that everyone can access since you no longer have any natural control over it. The extreme nonrival nature of information means that any expression of possession you make over it, after publishing it, is impotent, and your “ownership” of published information can only be guaranteed through external support, such as by the state.
• […..]
• The external protection of such a hard-to-possess form of property also runs against the gradient of economic sense. Information can be reproduced infinitely with no inherent marginal cost of reproduction — any cost is solely related to the medium of production. Since something with a zero marginal cost of reproduction is clearly not scarce, it also has no value that can be naturally protected.

The extreme nonrival nature of information is something to be cherished, to be nurtured, to be protected.

Next point.

For digital information to have value, we (the consumers/producers of information) must impute that value to information

This time I shall quote from Norbert Weiner. In a book titled Extrapolation, Interpolation, and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series, he has this to say:

Let us now turn from the study of time series to that of communications engineering. This is the study of messages and their transmission, whether these messages be sequences of dots and dashes, as in the Morse Code or the teletypewriter, or sound-wave patterns, as in the telephone or phonograph, or patterns representing visual images, as in telephoto services and television. In all communication engineering —[….]— the message to be transmitted is represented as some sort of array of measurable quantities distributed in time. [……] For the existence of a message, it is indeed essential that variable information be transmitted. The transmission of a single fixed item of information is of no communicative value. We must have a repertory of possible messages, and over this repertory a measure determining the probability of these messages.

From Weiner to Winterson. Jeanette Winterson has this to say about reading:

Good books are detonating devices, able to trigger something in the mind of the reader — a memory perhaps, or a revelation, or an understanding not possible by any other means…..The introverted nature of reading is part of its power. No one knows what you are thinking as you read. No one can see what changes might be taking place under the surface of your silent repose. It is this unaccountability to external authority that makes reading both defiant and an act of free will.

Information itself has no value. We have to impute that value, by interpreting it, giving it meaning, giving it credence. Esther Dyson covered some of this ground in a recent post in her new blog. Stephen Smoliar was on a parallel path in his recent post. The whole Semantic Web concept is built around how we can impute meaning, and therefore value, to the bits. And it is we who do that imputing.

As Stewart Brand said, Information Wants To Be Free. [Or maybe the updated version is as Don Marti said, via Doc Searls, Information wants to be $6.95]

Through meaning and interpretation comes value. Remember that the only fact on a financial statement is the cash position; everything else is conventional representation. And in this context, think Enron. Think Sarbanes-Oxley. Think revenue recognition. Think back-dating of options. It is through meaning and interpretation that information has value.

That imputation of value should not come from seeking to make an abundant commodity scarce, but from new ways of imputing value to digital information

The more I think about it, the more I worry about the “evolutionary” response to freeriders and to vandals, as we increase the number of blocks and filters we place on the World Live Web, on the Writable Web. People like Doc and Esther and Chris and Cory and Ross have successfully hammered the idea of the web being live and writable into my head, and now it won’t go away.

Clay Shirky first brought this to my attention, and it seemed reasonable. Innovations adapt to survive and thrive; for things like Wikipedia, he suggests that increased governance is an evolutionary adaptation necessary for survival. I have tended to agree with him, but now I’m not so sure. I think the retrograde nature of the adaptation is a cause for concern, and that we ought to look at new governance models, not variations of the old.

On the inside front cover of Democracy and The Problem of Free Speech, Cass Sunstein is quoted as follows: “Our government now protects speech that causes harm yet forbids speech that is essential.” I have this growing fear that we will live with far too many unintended and unwished-for consequences if we fall into the Increased Governance trap for community information. It is the community that creates the information, maintains it, corrects it where needed, imputes value to it, consumes it, archives it. And we must keep it that way.

We already have new ways of imputing value to such information

Linus’s Law, Given Enough Eyeballs, All Bugs Are Shallow, has itself been exposed to a good many eyeballs. Blogs and wikis are social-software instances where the same Law holds true. The opensource movement has already proven the worth of the Law; let us not give up now and revert to prior, and potentially destructive, governance models.

And we have new ways, ways that make use of the power of emergence a la Steven Johnson, of the power of democratised innovation a la von Hippel and Benkler. Ways like Reputation. Ways like Community Ratings and Collaborative Filtering. Ways like improving the concepts and implementation of the Semantic Web. Ways like better Pattern Recognition and Contextual Search, as Esther suggested. If you want examples, take a look at what Tom Bell (of the Chapman University School of Law) is doing. I quote from the abstract:

Copyrights and patents promote only superficial progress in the sciences and useful arts. Copyright law primarily encourages entertaining works, whereas patent law mainly inspires marginal improvements in mature technologies. Neither form of intellectual property does much to encourage basic research and development. Essential progress suffers.

Prediction markets offer another way to promote the sciences and useful arts. In general, prediction markets support transactions in claims about unresolved questions of fact. A prediction market specifically designed to promote progress in the sciences and useful arts – call it a scientific prediction exchange or SPEx – would support transactions in a variety of prediction certificates, each one of which promises to pay its bearer in the event that an associated claim about science, technology, or public policy comes true. Like other, similar markets in information, a scientific prediction exchange would aggregate, measure, and share the opinions of people paid to find the truth.

Because it would reward accurate answers to factual questions, a SPEx would encourage essential discoveries about the sciences and useful arts. Researchers and developers in those fields could count on the exchange to turn their insights into profit. In contrast to copyrights or patents, therefore, a SPEx would target fundamental progress. Furthermore, and in contrast to copyrights and patents, the exchange would not impose deadweight social costs by legally restricting access to public goods. To the contrary, a scientific prediction exchange would generate a significant positive externality: Claim prices that quantify the current consensus about vital controversies

I’m not saying we have the right answers already. What I am saying is that we need to look for the right answers; what I am also saying is that current retrograde governance suggestions are inappropriate.

The velocity of information is increasing, and traditional responses will not scale

And now for something completely different. Take a look at what Po Bronson said in Bombardiers:

Eggs Igino had been studying Economics for six years, and he’d never seen such a perfect display of the Third Law. He sat down at the small round table in the kitchen and tried to gather his thoughts. The First Law of Information Economics was simple. Knowledge is power. The Second Law was only a little more complicated: Knowledge is not a candy bar. If you eat a candy bar, the candy bar is gone. And if you give it to a friend, then he gets to eat it and you don’t. But with knowledge, you can’t use it up, and you can’t get rid of it by giving it away. This leads to the corollary to the Second Law: Word travels fast. Knowledge spreads much faster and more easily than any physical product, mostly because telling your friends doesn’t make you poorer. If knowledge spreads effortlessly to everyone, and if knowledge is power, then one logical conclusion was that everyone would have power. The other logical conclusion was that the power of knowledge was fleeting and temporary and we would all be powerless. Eggs Igino pulled a paper napkin off the breakfast cart and wrote on it with one of the corporate pens in light blue ink:

1. Knowledge is Power!

2. Knowledge is not a Candy Bar

2(b). Word Travels Fast

He stared at his theories. He underlined each of them twice as he rehearsed their logic. It was just so beautiful to see the salespeople so powerless and their world going to hell. For an intellectual like Igino, it was as beautiful as mitochondria in a petri dish or a mouse in a maze. Then he wrote below the other lines in large, energetic, slashing letters:

3. Power is Temporary!!!

We have learnt about the power of many. We have learnt about the corruptions that take place when reading/writing power is in the hands of a few. History is not just littered with examples, even the history we read has had its fair share of corruption.

Let’s not allow Gresham’s Law to become applicable to Information. Let’s keep traditional governance models where they deserve to be, filed somewhere even Google cannot find, and let’s concentrate on using the power of many, of peer review and rating and pressure and action.

I realise this may offend some of you. No offence intended, I am doing what I normally do, thinking aloud about things that matter to me. Always happy to be proven wrong. Comments welcome.

How do I love thee Wikipedia? Let me count the links.