Doc pointed me at Network Weaving. And I spent some time reading up what they’ve said and done. And rather than say any more, I’m going to leave it at that and just recommend you go read them.
There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear. One thing’s for sure. Cluetrain is getting both reciprocal as well as recursive.
When the dream came
I held my breath with my eyes closed
I went insane, like a smoke ring day
When the wind blows
Have you ever watched what happens when a gust of wind hits a smoke ring? Blows it to smithereens, makes it “go insane”. Do it sometime, just for a laugh. You don’t have to smoke, just know someone who still does.
It’s the same expression-of-freedom thing that happens in Cabaret, if I’m thinking of the right film. Liza Minnelli and someone else waiting in a tunnel for a train to pass, then yelling at the top of their voices as the train passes.
Catharsis.
I can only speak for myself, but the more I see of what we can now dream of doing with technology, the more I get a sensation of catharsis. Which, by the way, is connected to the Cathars in the same way the Canary Islands are connected to canaries. The Cathars were called the Cathars becaused they underwent catharsis. The canaries were called canaries because they were found on the island.
Why this sense of being purged, why this sense of release? Take a look at this.
Here’s one way of looking at our industry (apologies for the extreme brevity and lack of references, I just want to prove a simple point):
People get connected.
Information gets connected.
Markets get connected.
And life is good.
Because we learn to get out of the way. And allow value to emerge. Using things like Four Pillars.
After all, when all the vendors have been subjugated, we’re left with the biggest vendor of them all. Us. Internal IT departments.
This is why I feel we live in a period of catharsis, as we wash away the constraints of the past and get ready to do new things. And I’m with Neil Young watching smoke ring days when the wind blows, with Sally Bowles yelling my head off when the train goes by.
I look at every comment made on my blog. I try and find out who the commenter is. If someone links to me, I try and find out who it is and what they’re interested in.
Manual collaborative filtering. It’s not about ego. In fact, I don’t understand why someone would blog if that someone wasn’t interested in what other people said and what common AND different interests the others had.
It’s part of the point of blogging. Wisdom-of-crowds meets madness-of-crowds and emergence and serendipity and network effects.
So this morning I walked over to Mind This, since I saw a link and a comment. Liked the commented story, added and improved on bits of my Opposable Thumbs post. Rolled a snowball away, I know not where. Thank you Lars.
And then I saw this post by Lars. Probably been done a million times before, but it was a eureka moment for me.
A marriage is a conference is a concert is a marketing event is a school play or sports day is a community ritual gathering is a rite of passage.
We don’t call the tools social software for nothing.
And it is in the socialising of social software that better social software will emerge. For new purposes. For unthought-of purposes.
“…..O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’ He chortled in his joy. From Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll.
When I feel frabjous I feel very, very good indeed. Following up on something Clarence Fisher said about chess and 13-14-year-olds, I think Lewis Carroll is also a must for them. Pillow Problems and A Tangled Tale were seminal books for me.
I love chess. And if there was a particular game that made me start loving it, it was this one:
The game was between Edward Lasker and Sir George Thomas, London (Oct 29, 1912). It went as follows:
1.d4 f5 2.Nc3 Nf6 3.Nf3 e6 4.Bg5 Be7 5.Bxf6 Bxf6 6.e4 fxe4 7.Nxe4 b6 8.Bd3 Bb7 9.Ne5 O-O 10.Qh5 Qe7 11.Qxh7+ Kxh7 12.Nxf6+ Kh6 13.Neg4+ Kg5 14.h4+ Kf4 15.g3+ Kf3 16.Be2+ Kg2 17.Rh2+ Kg1 18.Kd2 mate
The diagram above picks it up at the end of move 10. A queen sacrifice starts an eight-move forced mate, gently urging the opponent’s king forward from Row 1 to Row 8, and having the option to deliver the coup de grace with a castling. Magical.
[If you want to play the whole game out on screen, then please follow this link from AJ Goldsby, who deserves much thanks].
And it was chess that taught me to look for ways to do the Einstein thing. Keep things as simple as possible, but no simpler.
I see four distinct ways we can reduce complexity in IT by taking “portfolio” approaches to the practice of IT management within the enterprise:
None of these is rocket science. They represent my attempts to mash up what I have learnt over the years, happily borrowing from others’ experiences and my mistakes. I will elaborate on them at a later date, this is just to assess reader interest.
A complete aside, triggered by my experiencing the sheer beauty of the Lasker-Thomas game again. Some of you may know of an Indian cricketer named GR Viswanath. Coming off a Test sequence of 161, 44, 52, 131 and 96, he returned to the pavilion out for 7. And then 10. And as he entered the pavilion, someone asked him how come he was out that cheaply. His reply (apocryphal of course, you know my stories by now) : “The ball deserved it”.
A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
Thanks to the BBC for the photograph. I couldn’t be bothered using the Getty Images version, it required me to get explicit permission from them beforehand whatever my reason. Digital wrongs.
Have you ever been in a position where you had to say something was “off the record” to a journalist, and then worried about whether it would stay that way? And does it matter anyway?
Apocryphal story. Kenny Dalglish was at a press conference announcing the return of Ian Rush from Juventus to Liverpool. And one of the reporters asked him how come he managed to keep both Rush moves a secret, his going to Juventus and his returning to Liverpool. Kenny’s taciturn reply was pure Kenny. “Simple. I didn’t tell anyone.” You know, even if he didn’t say it, he should have.
My father was a financial journalist. And his father before him. He told me many stories, and the odd maxim. A few examples:
There’s no such thing as off the record.
And I used to ask him why this was the case.
His reply? If you need to say it, then you don’t have the trust and the relationship to request it, much less enforce it.
Many years later, as I became more and more involved in conversations with startups and VCs and the innovator community, I saw a variant of this. The dreaded NDA. If you had to ask for one to be signed, you probably didn’t need to go any further. The request said it all.
And now, as we learn more about the impact of social software and modern web tools and IP telephony on mainstream media, I begin to wonder what happens next.
On the one hand, we have all the closed information drivers: privacy, secrecy, confidentiality, DRM, IPR. Roundly opposed by all the positive open information drivers: trust, transparency, collaboration; and some of the less positive: “disclosure” and whistleblowers and leaks
Again, I haven’t quite been able to put my finger on it, but I think something about old media required this schizophrenic approach to information. We have information. And we have secret information, known to a favoured few.
And something about new media, the democratisation of conversation, tends to make this less possible.
I feel we are proceeding to a world where all conversations are on the record. Because they happened. The record cannot lie.
Record everything. Archive everything. Search everything. Retrieve everything.