Category: Four pillars

Saw this in the Times today. A cosmetics company convinces the Dutch Supreme Court that one of its “fragrances” should be copyrighted; I can only infer that it couldn’t win the case on patent or trademark bases…. and given that the “original” retails at £40, and the “copy” at £3, I’m not meant to be surprised.

Whatever next. And people wonder why I call myself Confused.

I’ve now spent time reading through comments and coverage on the web, and came across Vicki Davis’s blog and post on the subject. It’s an absolute must-read. She knows what she is talking about.

Her point on the number of comments being made by people who have not read the Bill is itself worth noting. While I did read the Bill, I did not have the contextual knowledge she so clearly has, as to how schools in the US manage access to social software today. So I’m very grateful for her insights.

Anyone interested in the use of social software in education must read her post and her detailed critique of the Bill. There’s so much there for me to absorb and learn from. Thank you Vicki.

Thanks to Kevin Marks for bringing this to my attention. I quote from the ZDNet story:

• Web sites like Amazon.com and MySpace.com may soon be inaccessible for many people using public terminals at American schools and libraries, thanks to the U.S. House of Representatives.
• By a 410-15 vote on Thursday, politicians approved a bill that would effectively require that “chat rooms” and “social networking sites” be rendered inaccessible to minors, an age group that includes some of the Internet’s most ardent users. Adults can ask for permission to access the sites.
• “Social networking sites such as MySpace and chat rooms have allowed sexual predators to sneak into homes and solicit kids,” said Rep. Ted Poe, a Texas Republican and co-founder of the Congressional Victim’s Rights Caucus. “This bill requires schools and libraries to establish (important) protections.”
• Even though politicians apparently meant to restrict access to MySpace, the definition of off-limits Web sites is so broad the bill would probably sweep in thousands of commercial Web sites that allow people to post profiles, include personal information and allow “communication among users.” Details will be left up to the Federal Communications Commission.

Kevin also pointed me at what Danah Boyd had to say about this, which you can find here.

This is serious stuff. If the Bill becomes law, for one thing my Four Pillars suddenly becomes No Pillars. Or at best Two. But that’s not important.

What is important is Danah’s point about access. Social software skills are becoming more and more important, and are wonderful tools to create and release value. We are still learning about how to use them in education, healthcare and industry, but the value proposition is so profound that little, if any, analysis is required. What the Bill does is disenfranchise those whose primary access to social software is in schools and libraries. Which is incredibly saddening.

A few other observations.

One, the House voted 410-15 to pass the Bill. I wonder how many of those 415 have ever seen MySpace, much less used it.

Two, the Bill, while ostensibly designed to block MySpace, will affect all blogs and social networks for that matter most 21st century web sites, from Amazon thru eBay and Flickr. This is disenfranchisement on a magnitude that I find hard to believe. Again, probably carried out by people who have limited, if any, experience of the tools and facilities.

Three, if the Bill passes, the most likely outcome is that the very activity it seeks to prevent moves deeply underground, an appalling possibility. People forget the transparency that the web provides. At work I’ve always felt that driving dissent underground is counterproductive. In this context the parallel is worse than just counterproductive; new ways will be found that are actually harder to police than the status quo. And will cost a lot more. And yet fail.

Four, what we need is the exact reverse. Education in the benefits and risks of collaboration tools and social software, and ubiquitous access to the tools. And maybe we need to start not at the schools and the libraries, or even in the enterprises, but in the legislatures. Worldwide.

I’d be interested in knowing what Judy Breck and John Seely Brown and Clarence Fisher et al feel about this, with its terrible impact on education. So I shall watch their blogs with even more interest than is usual, if that is possible.

I love reading Tara at HorsePigCow; she writes stuff that’s sufficiently off-beat to make me think hard and go places I didn’t plan to go. Which is a good thing.

Tara recently posted on the death of the browser, and then followed up after a comment by JulesLt.

And it made me think. About the different behaviours people exhibit in the context of the devices they use, and how those behaviours change when the devices aren’t connected to the ether.

Let’s take the device first. And for the sake of this argument, let’s keep it simple and concentrate on the laptop or handheld computer.

Some people are happy to work “offline” on things, like choring through e-mail while connectionless on a plane; they get off the plane and then zap a plethora of mails out. They seem happy doing this.

I’m not sure why, but I don’t do this. And I perceive I’m not alone. I tend to work “analog” when I am not connected, rather than work “delayed-digital”. I read physical printed things. Listen to music. Sleep. Talk to people. And it’s not just the laptop, it’s the blackberry as well. No signal no writee.

Staying with devices. They become like pens. Some people want to use their particular special pen. Some will use the nearest pen they can find. Some don’t care. And that’s the way I see people use mobile computers.

When we look at applications, I take Tara’s Google Calendar point completely. There are some applications such as address books and calendars where you need an offline or no-connection facility, which requires a local copy. It is immensely frustrating to be denied access to low-volatility information just because you’re offline.

But you have to be careful. Local copies create their own evils. Synchronisation. The need for discipline in the size of what is synchronised. The problems of synchronisation failures or mismatches.

My guess is that there are some things where I would always want a local copy of the information, such as music and video and photo and address book and calendar. These are also things I can put easily on a USB stick. And all the synchronisation I want is probably at port or Bluetooth level in close proximity to the host device and independent of being connected to the ether. And I become personally responsible for the backing up and the housekeeping.

There are some things where I would always not-want a local copy of the information, where the joy comes from outsourcing the pain of looking after it and maintaining it and backing it up and and and. Like this blog.

As far as possible, I want to minimise the things I must have on my portable device, and have a full backup on flash memory. This way I can detach myself from device ownership, using the USB stick as my personal augment to any suitable device.

And offhand I don’t want to have anything that has to be replicated and synchronised between my device and a web server, too many things can and do go wrong.

But that’s just me.

An aside. I wish I could have an address book that worked like iTunes. A big library, with a Gracenotes equivalent to extend and enrich what I enter. And a simple way of creating contact playlists for phone, for blackberry, for laptop, etc.

Just musings.

There’s been some reaction to the musings I put forward in preparation for my next recap, particularly on the topic of caching-versus-long-tail; you can find the post and its comments here; Kevin Marks has some very worthwhile comments and links in his post as well. Thanks everyone.

The entire conversation made me think harder about hits and misses, how they are changing, what I think it means. So here goes.

First off I want to endorse and support what Kevin says, because I think it’s important. I quote from his post:

….we are moving to a world where we upload as much as we download

Just park that somewhere for now.

Let’s move on to hits and misses.

For sure I’m influenced by all the people I speak to, and all the stuff I read, so I have no precise idea where I saw the kernel for this snowball. But the way I look at it, today’s web paradigm, with search and discovery and tagging meeting collaborative filtering and social networks, and underpinned by the Kevin statement on uploading, this paradigm is all about misses. Not hits.

Hits are fundamentally abundant, and they need the application of a variety of devices to make them artificially scarce. Some of those devices are applied by hit originators and publishers: an example is the signed numbered “subscription” edition that precedes the abundant hit book. Some of those devices are applied by producers and distributors: an example is the staggered release of new films into different geographies (repeated in similar staggered releases into rental and purchase, aided and abetted by stupidities such as Region Codes). I could go on, but won’t.

Hits are fundamentally abundant.

[An aside. I think there is a link between the device of staggering film releases across geographies and the phenomenon of poor-quality piracy. There’s a bragging-rights aspect to watching a hit film. People want to be first. And where there are artificial blockages to being first, routes like piracy become attractive. If people want to reduce piracy, they could just do away with region-staggering. Just an opinion.]

Now let’s take misses. Misses are fundamentally scarce. Short production runs. Remaindering. Deletions. Out-of-print-ness. Whatever. And what the web does is allow us to create micro-markets around these misses, magically making them abundant again.

Now that’s a pretty pass. On the one hand, attempts to create artificial scarcities around abundant hits are failing. Leaving abundance. On the other hand, the natural scarcities implied by misses are being transformed into micro-market abundances.

Misses were fundamentally scarce. But are now abundant.

Both hits and misses become abundant, in markets where many business models were built around scarcity.

There is a difference. Hits can stay abundant in the physical as well as Digital Walled Gardens worlds, all broadcast models and DRMed-to-death distribution and simultaneous releases to global megatheatres and stuff like that can support abundance. Of a sort.

So people can and will go to the cinema to watch hits and turn on the television to watch hits and and and.

But with misses? The story is different. The ONLY place where misses can become abundant is in the micro-markets of the web. Long-tail don’t scale.

So over time I think, particularly for uploads and downloads of film and video, there won’t be a short fat head. The Snake On that Plane will be all tail. This may become true for books and songs as well, as the micro-uploaders get to Main Street.

It may just be possible that we can leave hits to their traditional and fossilised methods of delivery and distribution, and stop worrying about caching and bandwidth congestion; as the “bragging-rights-I-saw-it-first” become less important, people will choose how they want to access their hits.

What we should do is concentrate on the misses. It is in turning that scarcity into abundance that we create something of real value. Which is why I supported the abortive Google scan-everything moves.