Category: Four pillars

Four Pillars: Preparing for Generation M

I’m sure you’ve done it hundreds of times. Gone on a random walk around the web, triggered by something you saw somewhere. Well, it was my turn yesterday.

I was getting my head together preparing for a long-delayed post. WordPress Dashboard up, the specific New Scientist article (that triggered the post in the first place) beside me. Sitting comfortably. Fingers poised, hovering above remote Apple keyboard. About to press Write Post.
And then off I went like a distracted cat. No more “elegantly poised to strike” mode.
Photo Matt had posted something about WordPress Accounts, and for some strange reason I had to take a look. Blogger’s cramp? I hear you say…. Wishful thinking -)
And that journey took me here. A conference on Connecting and Collaborating in Ottawa.

Subtitled Online Tools for the Classroom.

Take a look at the agenda. I have no idea how good the conference was, the quality of the presenters, the content, the attendees, anything.

But the agenda was enough for me. If this is now mainstream then Generation M is here. Now.

Maybe Clarence Fisher or Judy Breck or someone else knowledgeable about what’s happening in this space, (maybe Nolind Whachell?) could comment.

I am amazed. I don’t think we can get boards of public companies to attend conferences with that kind of agenda. Nor governments.  Maybe this is happening all over the world, and I am completely unaware. I’m not proud, I’m quite happy to be proven completely uninformed about this sort of thing.

Four Pillars: Fulfilment: Amazon Online Reader

Chris Locke pinged me about this. It seemed only right that I tried it out on Cluetrain….

Very interesting. I’ve played with it for a while, but have yet to try the whole shebang on an Amazon Upgrade Program book. Will do so pretty soon, but probably not tonight. Tried it vicariously anyway.
The software stayed up while I tried to check its idiotproofness. Some of the digitising wasn’t up to scratch, but everything was nevertheless readable.

Liked the way a number of the elements of fulfilment were all there in one “holistic” screen. A title, a handle with which to pick the thing up, whatever route one took to discover it. Something more than a Look Inside function, a reasonable way to flip through the book.

It was easy to pretend to buy the book. But no easy way to get back to the Online Reader, and I’m not a Back Button fan. Something they should think about. I want to be able to drop something in my cart and still page through it.

Good search, the expected levels: Amazon books, all Amazon products, the web.

Absolutely LOVE the Surprise Me feature. Now when they give me that on a StumbleUpon basis, so that I can be taken randomly to a collaboratively filtered page in a book I haven’t read, they’re cooking something. I guess they need to avoid pages that Say The Butler Did It….
Will wait to try out the Highlight Bookmark Print stuff, but it looks good. Seems to work seamlessly, do I sense AJAX?

Biggest problem? I began to feel even more frustrated than usual about my having two different Amazon personas, one for Amazon.com and one for Amazon.co.uk.  Hey Amazon, it’s time to help people like me merge the two. If eBay doesn’t care and lets me move easily between the two then so should you. I don’t want to land up with two lockers.

That’s when it gets interesting. Can I put books I buy from Barnes and Noble into my Amazon locker? Or the other way around? Am I being unreasonable? The more lockers I have, the more locks I’m going to need. One locker please for all electronic purchases. Otherwise I will have many locks many locker and each lock designed to hogtie me to something.

And then we will all start feeling like Gulliver. Millions of little irritating things tying us down. Anyone want to start a generic electronic locker business, where I can put my iTunes and my Amazon and my Harvard Business Review and my BusinessWeek and and and, come talk to me.

Which reminds me. I think Google should have a new button on its main page. Where it says Web Images Groups News. I need a button there called Wikipedia. Yes I know I can go to Wikipedia myself and search there, but why can’t I do it via Google? I think of Wikipedia like I think of Images. So there.

Four Pillars: Manipulating information: Look Ma…. Hands

One of the questions I used to pose to the graduate intake here was this:

How do you think people will interact with information in five years time? Will it be analogous to (a) bloomberg.tv (b) Excel (c) Green Screen (d) Google (e) XBox? [I avoided giving them (f) Blue Screen of Death]

All I was trying to do was to make them think. Get them to discover for themselves that all the answers are correct, that the way people interact with information is about personal choice. That it has to do with facility and comfort zone and familiarity and je ne sais quoi. To each his own. If it works for you, it works.

And that we have to build systems that bear this in mind.
If you want to take a walk up memory lane,  watch this video. I found it compelling watching.
Puts a whole new meaning to manipulating information. This kind of manual labour I could get into.

Itemised versus All You Like: A Snowball Diaspora-At-Source

I was preparing for what will probably become my next post, triggered by something I read in the New Scientist. I couldn’t link to the full text of the article, it was hidden behind a Premium Wall. And it made me go off at a tangent, mid-post.

Most journals nowadays provide their print subscribers with free electronic access; some even provide electronic-only access at sharply reduced prices.

Why not let subscribers link to premium articles for free, via their blogs? As long as I have valid access to the pool, let me invite some friends to check out the water, as Seth Godin probably said sometime. Aren’t recommendations the most powerful form of advertising?

Obviously there are good, bad and stupid ways of doing this.

  • Stupid Way: Telling me I can link to ‘n’ articles a year for free as part of my subscription. Trojan Horse route to more pernicious DRM and micromanagement of person and content.
  • Bad Way: Asking me to pay some specified sum per link, small enough to attract me yet large enough to irritate me while I do it.
  • Good Way: Suck Free Powerful Advertising from the Firehose of Recommendation. Let me do it whenever I like. As often as I like.

Which brings me to the point of this post. We have to move from this mindset of Itemised Billing Living. Run from it. And go as close to Eat as Much as You Like Living.

Trade as much as you like. Call as much as you like. Drive as far as you like. That’s what it should be like.

Instead, we’ve been sold this pup of usage-based billing, and what a pup it turned out to be. And we probably pay for it separately, for the pleasure of having itemised billing.

Get that pooper-scooper out. Usage-based tariffs are Trojan Horses that let vendors build baroque billing and administration systems that can then be used to micromanage you out of existence. [You, Sir, spent £5.37 last month on calls that suspiciously look personal…… How do you plead? Puh-lease. Give them Itemised Billing and they go and build an Itemised Billing Analysis Department. Fossilfools.] Usage-based tariffs are neither simple nor convenient.
Instead, we should strive for two purchase models.

As Much as You Like. Either Time-based (per month, per year, whatever) or Capacity-based (fill your trolley, your plate, your bowl or your boots).

One-off. Pay for the transaction. Nothing more.

A Simple Desultory Philippic: Or How We Get [Take Your Pick]-d into Submission

[With due deference to Simon and Garfunkel: A Simple Desultory Philippic. Great song]

Kathy Sierra on what might happen if Sudoku was given the Big Tech Company and Big Marketing treatment. To be found here. Loved it. A lesson for all of us as to how we make simple things complex, useless, unworkable. Don’t miss the iPod bit at the end…..

Thank you Kathy. Made my day.