I had asked earlier “If pearls begin with nacre then what do snowballs begin with?” in a Searlsian snowball sense. There have been a number of suggestions, ranging from flutter to nub to kernel.
I like Kernel. Thanks Sean. Let’s see what happens. If Kernel is to be the kernel then we will have a snowball…….
With over 12 gig of music in my iTunes, I’ve been playing with different approaches to choosing what to listen to. And trying to learn from them, taking a vicarious look at what Generation M may do.
Why? I think I’m straitjacketed, anchored and framed with my own experience, and (whether I want to admit it or not) more set in my ways than I think. But my personal corruption and inertial thought is probably more to do with classic information than multimedia information, so maybe I can stretch myself by using music as the proxy for my “information”, pretend to be Generation M for a short while. (Before my kids throw me out, screaming with laughter and ever-so-slightly embarrassed).
There’s one more reason. Something I remembered from one of Steve Job’s classic And Another Thing sessions. Probably the Panther one, when he suggested they’d been thinking of doing something about search, then realised they’d already solved it, for iTunes. And so to Spotlight.
You don’t have to agree with him. You don’t even have to like Apple. But thinking about how people access music today, how they might do so tomorrow, how they might want to do it the day after tomorrow, surely that’s worth while.
So what can I do today?
Something for us to mull over. I haven’t even begun to add collaborative filtering and voting-based refinements and commonsense boolean operations and the heuristics that can be applied. I haven’t really started documenting the mashup mindset hitting enterprise information. Or the impact of mobility. Or of telephony becoming software. All later.
But I know already that I would want to train graduates and new hires using some variant of the playlist and the most frequently played concepts.
Comments welcome.
Thanks to David Terrar for pointing this out to me. Great article on The New Laws of Digital Technology from The Pfeiffer Report.
The Laws in brief:
Read the original for yourselves, it’s worth it. Even if you don’t agree with it, it may help you figure out what you do agree with. And this is an important subject. Simplicity and convenience are must-haves rather than nice-to-haves, and we have a lot to learn about how we provide them.
On the day I saw David Terrar’s post and the link to Pfeiffer, serendipity meant I had my copy of Richard Gabriel’s Patterns of Software with me, for a short time between one borrower and another. And that reminded me that I should re-read Worse Is Better (is Worse) (Is Not) in all its forms and arguments. For those of you interested in reading the papers, I’ve linked to a Gabriel article that points to ALL the pdfs here.
I will comment later on all this, but felt it was worth sharing the originals with you as soon as possible. The key for me? The Law that states
Any feature that requires learning will only be adopted by a small fraction of users.
And, in my own warped way, I love the corollary that it suggests to me. Any feature that does not require learning will be adopted by a large fraction of users.
Generation M comes trained to expect things to work certain ways. They don’t recognise DRM and IPR and Identity and the dangers of multispeed internets and the problems with badly implemented IMS and the evils that can be done under the guise of privacy and security.
Privacy is important, security is important. When applied to the individual. Not when used as an excuse to create lock-in.
Thank God for Generation M. They may be able to achieve things that we haven’t: to take on lock-in specialists and win.
When you see the sheer number of articles floating around on Microsoft versus Apple, or Google or, The Next Big Thing, it’s not surprising that there’s a tendency for your eyes to glaze over. A Road From Damascus Experience, where scales zoom upwards and attach themselves to your eyes.
I guess you feel the same about Net Neutrality. About IMS. About Viiv. About IPR and DRM in general.About Identity. About Ways to Deal With Spam. Touchy woolly amorphous partially-incomprehensible subjects, with enormous volumes of passionate literature and conversation, being machine-gunned at you from a variety of directions using diverse techniques and media.
I don’t blame you. In fact that’s part of the reason why I call this blog Confused of Calcutta. These are not easy times for anyone who is passionate about these things, about the magic that can be woven if the Information Age is allowed to reach and extend its potential.
Which is why I picked up the latest issue of New Scientist this evening, and started reading an article headlined Heavyweights fight for control of your computer. My apologies, this time around I could not link to the full text, it was hidden away behind yet another premium wall. And I read it with some loss of enthusiasm. Eyes suitably Krispy Kremed, glazed-over like doughnuts.
I’m just going to provide a commentary on the article, quoting directly as needed. Unless quotation marks are used, please assume the words are mine.
Gates called Microsoft’s competition with Google “hyper-competition”. Snore. Another antitrust lawsuit, this time brought up by Google, this time about default search engine settings on the next IE. Snore. Microsoft pours gazillions into going into direct competition with Google. Double snore.
“This time, the fundamental issue at stake is how we will use our computers in the future.” Whoa. Snores subside. Slowly wakening again.
“Underscoring the battle for domination are two visions for how and where our digital data should be stored, how we should access it and who else should see it”. Okay that does it, I am now wide awake. Metamorphosed From Dormouse to March Hare.
What had I missed? What had I not seen in its proper light? Google was a platform reliant on browsers, provided search, made money from advertising. Thinking hard about snoring again. Microsoft needed to protect the PC’s role and usefulness. Definitely a chance for some zees again…
Then wham! Saucepan and face meet. Hard. All thought of sleep gone. “The two alternative visions for the future are coming into conflict now because of improved browser technologies. Until recently, browsers could only be used to view web pages. Activities such as using word procesdsing programs, calendars, spreadsheets and viewing phots had to be done on the desktop because it took too long for conventional browsers to fetch data from a remote server each time a user wanted to access or update something.” The writer, Celeste Biever, now has my complete attention. [I’d seen some interesting work by her before, I particularly remember an article on Infocards and digital identity that Kim Cameron also commented on.]
There’s then some blurb about AJAX and broadband. About Writely and Google Calendar and Google Earth and Picasa. My simple summary: Google wants everything deliverable by browser; AJAX and broadband help, but not enough. Some Google stuff still needs to be downloaded and run locally. Nothing surprising there. Microsoft would prefer applications that “will run most effectively with a combination of browser and desktop”. Popes and bears.
The next bits started worrying me a bit. “Gary Flake, director of the company’s Live Labs in Redmond, Washington, says that not only will you have more privacy storing your digital data on your desktop than on a remote server, but certain things just cannot be done using a browser. Video editing would be frustratingly slow, for example”…..
The next bit of the article discusses how collaborative filtering could be done for music and for search by comparing personal stuff and why local disks are important for supporting all that. Fundamentally, the claim there is that local disk is good because it protects your privacy and remote storage does not.
Then we get to this: “Each user would have a file stored on their desktop that records keywords they have used for their searches. When one of their Windows Live Messenger buddies then enters the same keyword into a search, Microsoft could use what they know about you from your file to make assumptions about what your buddy is likely to be searching for.”
By the time I finished reading the article, I had reached an unusual level of concern, almost cynicism. Something I am not used to feeling.
I saw through a glass very darkly. Very very darkly.
I saw how identity and privacy and security and safety could be used to defend, even augment, bad decisions on net neutrality and on DRM. And I saw how easily it could happen. Lots to think about.
There’s always some stimulus to write a post about something. It may come from something you read, something that comes up in physical conversation, something you see while surfing the web, whatever. And sometimes it’s none of these, it’s your personal muse.
I tend to think of this stimulus, this spark, as the thing that sets the snowball off. And I wish I had a word for it, like pearls have nacre. I don’t want to use nacre because likening blogs to pearls feels a bit presumptuous. Yet stimulus and spark and root and words like that don’t feel right either.
The sense I’m trying to capture is one which shows the opensource and shared and emergent and free and growing and energetic and creative nature of ideas in blogs, something that snowball captures well. What do we call this thing that starts a snowball? Doc, anyone else, any ideas?