Category: Four pillars

Neville Hobson (who appears to have had a change of address) pointed me towards a company that seemed to believe that enterprise tagging was somehow different from tagging. You can find the full text of his post here.

That started me thinking. Which is probably a bad thing, as most people who know me will aver. But so be it.

I like tags because they’re simple. Because they don’t have to be predefined pieces of some gigantic reference data model for the universe. Or even the enterprise. Reference models are to information what Gantt charts are to projects; ways to make the intermediate product (the database or the plan) more important than the goal. Okay, rant over.

I like tags because they allow one person to say tomahto and another to say tomayto and still figure out they mean the same thing. There is value in letting people describe things exactly as they see them, because that’s probably how they would intuitively look for them.

And if we land up with lots of synonyms, even misspellings, so be it. Use heuristics and collaborative filtering techniques to weed out or let atrophy those things that need to.

I can see “free, unfettered” tags helping with:

• crossing language and geography barriers, translating between cultures
• cross-referencing between systems, translating between data formats
• bridging individual perceptions, translating between perspectives

My gut feel is that we should avoid being prescriptive about these things. Otherwise we will land up with modern versions of the e-mail folder systems I love to hate.

Which brings me to what started me thinking about this in the first place. What is the difference between tagging and enterprise tagging, and why would I need specialist software to help me do it? I can understand privacy and data protection and secrecy and all of that ilk, and if that’s the reason and all we are doing is a behind-the-firewall implementation of the same thing, then I need to understand why I need something separate for it. I’d be interested in other opinions.

More later.

 

 

 

Before ConfusedofCalcutta, this blog was meant to be called NotWavingButDrowning. Why? Two reasons. One, because I really like Stevie Smith’s poem, there’s something about it. And two, I thought it was a strong metaphor for what we face with information.

So I went ahead and bought the domain name. But could I figure out for sure which particular set of permissions I needed to use a domain name that quoted four words in sequence from a poem written probably sixty years ago by someone who died thirty-five years ago? So it lies unused. One day….

Martin Geddes commented on something I’d said earlier, and is someone I “know” through the web and (I shudder to admit it) e-mail, trying to make sense of bad law around that marshy and smelly mess where telco meets internet meets regulator meets cableco. He keeps an interesting multilogue going here.

[Martin, I agree with you. But people really get wound up when I point out the zillion reasons why e-mail is bad. It’s a long hard fight.]

Back to my NotWaving point. I’m used to believing that man spends maybe 3.5 hours a day “consuming information” and that this figure has stayed pretty constant over the last forty years. Say since Moore. During that time, but particularly after the Web, the amount of information that can be consumed has grown by multiple orders of magnitude. There’s probably a Someone’s Law out there telling me that rate of growth.

Something’s gotta give, and each of us needs ways of attracting information, filtering it, retaining what we choose to, enriching it, passing it on. We need better search and syndication and collaboration and communication and visualisation and and and.

None of this is new to anyone out there, I’m sure. What was new to me was how complicated all this was. The internet and telco and ICANN and net neutrality and governance stuff. The IPR and Digital Rights and Mickey Mouse Acts and “just what is patentable” stuff. The incumbent vendors and their lock-ins and proprietary formats and permissioning and authentication issues. How easy it was to build accidental walled gardens inside organisations, to augment the ones we already have.

And the ones we have are called e-mail and proprietary content management and. I shall stop there.

One of my favourite poems is Yeats’ “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”.

Extremely powerful. When I was 15, and I read it for the first time, what really struck me was that the airman flew because he loved flying. Not because of glory or honour or duty or war or pestilence or whatever. He loved flying.

I love working with information. And in a digital world, with costs of reproduction and transmission tending towards zero, we can really make a difference to our world today and tomorrow, particularly in education. Which is why I’m excited about reading Judy Breck’s book; I’ve been trudging around her site and like a lot of what I see. Take a look.

Thanks for the heads-up, Judy. [Another serendipitous meeting through blogs].

I went for my usual Saturday morning constitutional, a walk into town, coffee (lots of) and a browse through the charity shops, I think they call them thrift shops in the US. Probably only to be found in the “West”, I can’t remember ever seeing one in India.

And I bought a secondhand copy of Rime of the Ancient Mariner, illustrated by Gustave Dore, published by Dover. While savouring the full-size engravings over coffee, I glanced at the Dover statement on the back cover….excerpted here: “Books open flat for easy reference. The binding will not crack or split. This is a permanent book.”

This is a permanent book. What a wonderful statement. And I realised that for forty years, I have trusted Dover as an imprint and a publisher. I have memories of my earliest schoolboy Pillow Problems and my Sam Loyds being Dovers.

Now I have no idea who owns Dover, how many people it employs, what it does. What I do know is that I trust Dover, and I will often buy Dovers even when I’ve never heard of the author or the subject. Just because it’s Dover.

The same happens with Kirkus Reviews. If Kirkus say a book is good, then I buy it. Period.

Again, I have no idea how big Kirkus is, who owns it, whatever. I just know that when Kirkus says it’s good, I tend to agree.

I trust Dover. And I trust Kirkus. And this trust has been gained over a long time over a large population of recommendations. These examples are about books, something I grew up surrounded by, something I remain immersed in, but probably irrelevant to the next generation of workers. Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be and all that jazz.

This whole episode of Coleridge and Dore over coffee then made me think about that next generation, what their Dovers and their Kirkuses will be. So here are my musings:

• They peer into the future
• Unlike our generation, used to centralised reference points and quality attributions, the youth of today rely on aggregated peer reviews and ranking. Distributed rather than centralised, networked rather than hierarchical. And they are used to interacting peer-to-peer
• Their world is flat
• We’re used to paying by the yard, by the pound (yes I am showing my troglodyte nature). More and more, they’re used to flat fees. Not transaction pricing. Unlimited use. No hidden charges. No creeping taxes crawling out of the woodwork.
• They’re always on
• The DSL Tivo iTunes Messenger mindset thinks differently. They don’t do dialup. They don’t switch things off and on, they switch themselves off and on. But the things stay. And they’re a mobile generation, used to doing things on the move
• They don’t lock doors here*
• They’re used to easy access and egress, and have little tolerance for things like format mismatches and compatibility checks.

What have these things to do with trust? I guess I’m drawing a warped line from values and experience through to expectation, and suggesting that the only things they will trust are those that fulfil those values and expectations. And somewhere in the dark recesses of my head, I can’t differentiate between their expectations of a firm that wants to employ them, a device they use to experience entertainment, an institution that helps them learn. All the same to them.

So to win them over we need to get with the program. Theirs. And the Dovers and Kirkuses of their generation will be the firms that meet that expectation. Peer-reviewed and recommended, not Mcluhan-advertised. No hidden costs or charges or lock-in. Supporting mobility and always-on-ness.

*A variant of one of my favourite lines from one of my favourite movies: Local Hero. I just love the scene where the young upstart turns up very late at this pub in the middle of nowhere in Scotland, starts banging on the door and waking everyone up, and the landlord finally puts his head through the window and says “We don’t lock doors here”.

I want to live in a world where we don’t lock doors anywhere.

Why do I get hung up about platform independence and vendor-neutral strategies, about avoiding layers of lock-in?

Not because it’s cool, I’m too old for that. Cool is not a word to use when you’re fighting to hold on to your teeth and your hair. My children blench every time I use the word.

Not because it’s easy to follow such a path, it isn’t. There’s a need to accept delayed gratification and for emotional intelligence a la Goleman.

Not because it’s faster than any other (it isn’t). Snake oil is always easier to buy than to make.

But because we pay too high a price any other way. The price is freedom. Freedom of movement, freedom to share, the ability to manoeuvre, to adapt, to adjust to unknown futures.

I tend to think that people who buy vendor-locked-in products are buying trains on tracks while thinking they’re buying cars. They don’t see the tracks. They don’t see the problems with manoeuvring. They don’t realise the track is there until they try to move off it. By which time it’s too late.

The guy who owns the tracks decides where the train goes. You, as train driver and crew and passenger, can only decide to stay in one place or go where the track takes you. And sometimes you can’t even elect to stay, you’re in the way.

I am of the opinion that social software can never come from a single vendor. Cannot be allowed to. Otherwise all we do is put off the next battle for breaking up Bells, the next net-neutrality-style debate, the next ICANN argument. And we really don’t need that.

So. If social software should not come from a single vendor, a “let the market decide” approach, then how do we decide what to use?

I don’t have the answers. But what I have been trying to do is to follow a few principles:

1. Keep your mail and IM and blog and wiki and audio/video distinct and separate in terms of origin. But common in terms of vision and direction. And supported by an open community of developers who can extend and modify the product sets.
2. Make sure that regardless of origin, the tools you select must let you implement your own version of single sign-on, of authentication and permissioning, of identity management. They have to make it easy for you, not the other way around. #
3. Make sure the information that flows in each piece remains open; open to common ways of archiving and restoring, of recording and retrieving. Look out for train tracks that say “you can only search using tool X” “you can only share in manner A” “you can only archive in way Z”.
4. Have some common way of naming things that are shared by the different pieces, so that 2 and 3 are achievable. We will need new upstream registries all the time.
5. Plan for telephony becoming software, for mobility support and location-specific services and device agnosticism and related issues all the time. Their time is almost here.
6. Plan to record everything. Archive everything. Search everything. Retrieve everything. Independent of device and location and time and language and connect style.

Those are my thoughts and experiences as we stand. And the only way I can see, to keep to all the principles, is to use products clearly and demonstrably based on opensource. Not vendor standards. Not industry standards (just vendors under a different name). Not market standards (biggest wins). But community standards.

No point having the only phone in town, or phones that only work between prime-pairs on Saturdays.

Social software is all about ecosystems. And open adaptive evolutionary ecosystems at that, able to respond to external stimuli. Not integrated-platform offers. Not Digital Wrongs Management.

I’d love to know what has worked for others. And as importantly what hasn’t worked.