Category: Four pillars

Why we share: a sideways look at privacy

This is a follow-up post to one I wrote nearly three months ago, Musing About Sharing and Privacy. This time, I’m trying to focus on just one thing. What makes people share. Incidentally, while talking about sharing: if you’re interested in privacy I would strongly recommend you read this post by Danah Boyd and this post by Stowe Boyd (no relation).

I was particularly taken with danah’s Five Things You Must Know About Privacy In A Digital Context, something I’ve had the privilege of hearing danah speak about in person. Here’s an excerpted version:

  • We must differentiate between personally identifiable information (PII) and personally embarrassing information (PEI).
  • We’re seeing an inversion of defaults when it comes to what’s public and what’s private…. you have to choose to limit access rather than assuming that it won’t spread very far.
  • People regularly calculate both what they have to lose and what they have to gain when entering public situations.
  • People don’t always make material publicly accessible because they want the world to see it.
  • Just because something is publicly accessible does not mean that people want it to be publicized. Making something that is public more public is a violation of privacy.

danah also makes a key comment during her SXSW talk, linked to earlier:

Fundamentally, privacy is about having control over how information flows.

The public/private/secret distinctions that Stowe draws out are also worth noting and considering. danah and stowe, in their different ways, have spent considerable time seeking to explain to others what they’ve learnt and understood about privacy, and I don’t want to undermine any of it. Rather, I want to look at things from a slightly different perspective, trying to figure out why people share.

photo courtesy the Green Children Blog

Nearly a decade ago, I was transfixed by a book called Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Organisations. I have no hesitation in recommending you read it; the book did more for my understanding of post-Maslowian thinking than any other I had read before or since. [And I am so pleased to see that one of the authors of the book, Nitin Nohria, is to become Dean of Harvard Business School from 1 July 2010.

In the book, Nohria and Lawrence make a very simple assertion, summarised below:

Editor’s Note: In Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices, the authors combine the latest thinking from the biological and social sciences to lay out a new theory on human nature. The idea: We are all influenced and guided by four drives: acquiring, bonding, learning, and defending. In this excerpt, Lawrence and Nohria examine how an organization built around the four-drive theory might look.

We are all influenced and guided by four drives: acquiring, bonding, learning, and defending.

That’s how I look at sharing. Speaking personally, most of the time when I share things (like my thoughts here), I share them because I want to learn. As I share, I make myself vulnerable, and in making myself vulnerable I strengthen bonds with the people I share with. As those bonds strengthen, trust between us grows, and I am less alone, less isolated. Which satisfies my drive to defend when under attack.

All learners are teachers as well, and there may be a sense of acquisition as learning takes place via sharing. So to my warped way of thinking, sharing is one of the mosy natural things for a human being to do: the act of sharing seems to satisfy all four of our core drivers.

Man was born to share.

My thanks to Dieter Drescher for the photograph above

The past few decades have been characterised, at least in part, by the introduction of a plethora of tools that make sharing easier. Tools we call social software or social media and a variety of other names, covering blogs, wikis, instant messaging, community media sites such as YouTube or Flickr or last.fm or blip.fm or the daddy of them all, Wikipedia, social networking sites such as facebook or LinkedIn, news and status update sites such as Twitter, even location signallers such as foursquare or gowalla; without even going into the giant landscape of “vertical” communities like epicurious.

I tend to think of all these things as belonging to one or more of four camps: places where I can share things; places where people can share things with me; tools I can use to share things with others; tools that others can use to share stuff with me.

And all these things are relatively new. So we’ve got to figure out how they work, what they’re good for, what they’re less good for. The only way we’re really going to be able to learn about these things is by using them. And finding out what works, and what doesn’t work. What to share. With whom. How. What to receive from others. Who the others should be.

David Weinberger writes eloquently about the importance of tagging, amongst other things, in Everything is Miscellaneous. Sharing alone is not enough, we have to make what we share easy to consume. So the tools become important.

For the last few years, I’ve been trying out many social sites, learning what makes them tick, how to get value from them, how to create value in them. Many of these services allow you to cross-post to others. Some tools even let you post what you’re saying in one medium on to all others. And by posting stuff all over the place, I’ve been able to learn what people like me to share, what people want me to share. And what they don’t want from me.

Over the years a few truths have emerged:

1. People are different in different electronic communities, and you have to figure out the frequency of information flow that each community feels comfortable about.

2. People are interested in different things you do, and uninterested in many other aspects of what you do. So you have to learn how often a particular community wants to hear from you; your facebook community is different from your flickr community is different from your twitter community is different from your blog community is different from the community you work with every day. I tweet every now and again in bursts. Covering conferences. Cooking. Reading. Listening to music. I have to figure out where each type of tweet should be shared, something I continue to learn about.

3. Everyone is learning about all this, so you’re going to have to subscribe and unsubscribe all over the place, as you figure out what’s useful and what’s not.

So.

While everyone worries about privacy, spend some time thinking about sharing. Think about what you want to share. Why you want to share it. With whom you want to share it.

We’re still in the wild west phase of all this: we’re learning about what we like to hear from others; we’re learning about what others would like to hear from us; and we’r learning about how we want to “control” all this. In the meantime, people who provide the services that let us do all this are trying to figure out how to make money while giving us those services. And everyone’s trying to figure out who ‘owns” what, all during a time when emerging generations are questioning the very concept of ownership. Maybe it’s time everyone re-read Lewis Hyde‘s The Gift.

Some of us, like me, are the experimenters, trying to figure out how to use all this stuff. So when I share that I’m going to a Cat Stevens concert, I’m gratified when someone thanks me for sharing that. Because their partner was a Cat Stevens freak and it made a difference.  When I share what I’m cooking for dinner, I was encouraged to use photographs, something I wouldn’t otherwise have done. When I share what I’m listening to, people complained that I was filling up their view, and I had to “turn the noise down”. When I shared my location, my daughter complained that her ex-boyfriend was stalking her through my tweets, so I cut off the Twitter-facebook feed.

These are all just examples. Real, but examples. The truth is that we have a lot to learn. And that is something that happens with anything new.

I had the privilege of meeting Freeman Dyson via his daughter Esther some years ago, at a Flight School event. It may even have been the inaugural one. And there, Freeman was regaling us with talk about what it was like in the heady “nuclear” days of the late 1940s, when they really thought they could use nuclear power to send rockets into space, without any real deep knowledge of the damage that would follow.

It didn’t happen. We learnt about the impact of that kind of radioactive fallout in time. Not in time for Hiroshima or Nagasaki, tragically, but we learnt.

And that’s what happening about digital privacy and sharing. We’re learning. And there are going to be mistakes. And there will be hurt. And out of all that new value will emerge. People like danah help us and safeguard us, because they’re looking at some of these issues deeply. People like the Web Science Trust are looking into this. People like the Berkman Center are looking into this. Even people like the World Economic Forum are looking into this. Because it matters.

In the end, it’s what danah says: privacy is about having control over information flows. What goes out of you. What comes into you. You choose. That’s privacy. And sharing.

Thinking about social objects and limbo dancing

There was a time when people had real beards and real names and real jobs. People such as Theodatus Garlick pictured below, one of the world’s first plastic surgeons, and perhaps one of the world’s first daguerrotype photographers. [Incidentally, I am grateful to the delightfully named Increase Lapham, whose wonderful collection of cartes-de-visites and cabinet cards is made accessible by the Wisconsin Historical Society, whom I must also thank.]

There was a time when it became possible to capture unusual juxtapositions of famous people, such as the photograph below, where a young Mohandas Karamchand (“Mahatma”) Gandhi appears to be wistfully unaware of his companion, the then somewhat more famous Nobel-winning poet, playwright, musician and novelist Rabindranath Tagore. My thanks to the Rare Book Society of India for making the photograph available to me.

There was a time when it became possible to capture incongruous events like this one, of Fidel Castro golfing, apparently with Che Guevara (captured by Alberto Korda, who also took the iconic Che shot that now graces t-shirts the world over):

There was a time when telephone engineers were top-hat-wearing Very Important People, festooned with tools (including some in the top hat) and nonchalantly carrying ladders and cables, as one does…. my thanks to BT Heritage for the photograph. [Incidentally, you might enjoy visiting the TeleFocus service there].

We live in amazing times, where it is possible for me to share such amazing photographs with you. Some hurdles remain, particularly in the context of copyright, but they are easing. Incidentally, this gives me an excuse to publish, for the nth time, my all-time favourite photograph, of an orphan boy hugging his first-ever new pair of shoes. [And the web has made it possible for me to identify the orphanage, the time, the year, the photographer, even the name of the boy!]. Here it is:

So where is this post heading, and what does it have to do with social objects?

Everything.

Ever since Hugh Macleod spoke to me about social objects, and pointed me towards what Jyri Engestrom had written, I’ve been fascinated by the concept. I had the pleasure of hearing Jyri at Reboot (I think it was in 2008) and he didn’t disappoint, he was excellent.

You know what makes an object “social”? We do. Without us there is no “social”, even if we use objects to extend and enhance that socialness.

Photographs are social objects, which is why it would come as no surprise if Facebook now had more photographs than Flickr. Films are social objects. Songs are social objects. Books. Sporting events. TV programs. Concerts. They’re all social objects.

When we see lists like that, we can start believing that all social objects are “content”, which gets the “rightsholders” of content salivating up the wazoo. Perish the thought.

Content is not what makes an object social. We do.

There was a time when “content” was created by a tiny minority of people, largely because the tools for making that content were elitist in nature. Scarce, expensive, needing specialist skills. To make matters worse, the techniques for distributing and sharing that “content” were also elitist in nature. So people who “owned” that “content” felt like kings.

Now things have changed. There’s been some limbo-dancing. The barriers to entry for creating, publishing and distributing “content” are getting lower by the minute. Which means that the content kings are all dressed up with nowhere to go. And so the only option they think they have is to try and recreate the barriers they used to enjoy, in paradigms where they are technically and economically difficult to recreate.

The most valuable social objects are the ones we create. Our narratives, our stories. Our memories. Our lives. Hopelessly intertwined with our family and friends, our associates, our acquaintances, our colleagues, even our enemies.

We are our stories. We used other, weaker, proxies for our stories at a time when we could not capture, publish and share our own stories. And, as long as there are no paywalls or DRM or suchlike, we will continue to use proxies, but only to augment our stories. They are not the stories. We are. They are not social objects per se. We make them social.

People who used to “own” “content” still have roles to play. While digital content will continue to trend towards free, there are many ways to make money because of that content rather than with that content, the “because effect”. Time-based premia. Analog sales. Authenticity. Merchandising. All the “better than free” ideas that Kevin Kelly tells us about.

As the cost of producing content drops, as the cost of distributing content drops, as the process of creating the content gets more and more democratised, something new happens. We start having too much content. Which means the role of curators increases in importance. Curation is about access, about trust, about relationships, about expertise, about context. So the content rightsholders of old have an opportunity to excel, since they have the inside track to providing these. We used to go to them for content they generated. Now we can go to them for content we generate. That is, if they stop their paywall tomfoolery. We pay for service, not for content.

I think that’s what Andrew Savikas was trying to say.

So remember, content does not a social object make. We make objects social. Our stories. Our narratives. Our memories. Our photographs. Our songs. Our shared experiences.

Back to Hugh Macleod, who taught me so much about social objects. Thank you Hugh.

As Hugh says, it’s time to …..remember who we are.

Thinking about predictability: More musings about Push and Pull

Chichen Itza photograph courtesy JuanRojo

If you’ve been following this blog for long, then you’ll probably know that I’ve been interested in a number of themes to do with information and its implications on business structures and process. You will also know that every now and then, I use the arenas of food and music to illustrate points or issues.

Of late, much of my time has been taken up in reading (and re-reading) The Power of Pull, and I’ve written a couple of posts on the subject. Messrs Hagel, Seely Brown and Davison have really made me think about things; they’ve answered some of the questions I’ve had for a while, and raised a number of new ones.

In parallel, I’ve also been delving into collapse theory, sparked off by Clay Shirky’s excellent post on the collapse of complex business models. That led me on to digging deeper into Joseph Tainter; I ordered and read The Collapse of Complex Societies straightaway; if any of you is interested in collapse theory, I would strongly recommend you read it; it is also really worth reading a long book review that Professor Tainter did, headlined Collapse, Sustainability and the Environment: How Authors Choose to Fail or Succeed.

Clay has also been responsible for putting a third, connected, stream of thinking into my head, via Kevin Kelly, another must-read person. The Shirky Principle. [Incidentally, you can rest assured I will be reviewing Clay’s upcoming book, Cognitive Surplus. I’ve already ordered it; how nice it was to see that the book was actually being released same-day US and UK. I am so sick of artificial scarcities.]

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky

So that’s where my head is right now. Thinking about institutions built fundamentally around “push” principles trying to survive in a “pull” world. Thinking about institutions that are designed that way through no fault of their own; these principles have been the basis of management and economics thinking for the best part of a century. Thinking about institutions that “try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution”. Thinking about institutions that grow more and more complex over time, and then collapse.
Which leads me to the main point of this post. Predictability.
In the Power of Pull (pg 37) the authors articulate a number of “instincts, assumptions and beliefs” that make up “the philosophy of push”:
  • There’s not enough to go around
  • Elites do the deciding
  • Organisations must be hierarchical
  • People must be molded
  • Bigger is better
  • Demand can be forecast
  • Resources can be allocated centrally
  • Demand can be met
I am particularly taken with the Demand can be forecast/Demand can be met statements. For some years now, I have been bemused at the things institutions do in order to make something fundamentally unpredictable into something somehow more predictable.
Through sheer serendipity I was at Burroughs Corporation when the firm, and the industry, began to realise that the money was moving from hardware to software; I was at Data General when the firm, and the industry, began to realise that the money was moving from proprietary to open; I was at Cap Gemini when the firm, and the industry, began to realise that IT services were moving from national to global scale; I was at Dresdner Kleinwort when the firm, and the industry, began to realise that financial services were moving from analog to digital.
In each case, there was a significant shift taking place in the industry, one that was going to transform the entire market radically. In each case, there was a clear institutional response. And in each case, the response was expected to provide a predictability of outcome that was required to be of unusual precision for such an emergent venture in such a changing environment.
I saw the same thing when it came to “agile” methods and practices. Everybody seemed to understand what the methods and practices were; and then, for some strange reason, everyone expected some incredible level of precision in planning and outcome which militated against any concept of agility; this is what I was referring to as the “planning horizon” problem in a recent post.
These behaviours caused a level of cognitive dissonance in me, and I’ve therefore been thinking about it for some time now. Right now I don’t want to go into why people want this predictability, suffice it to say that it appears to be a Push principle as articulated in the book. What I want to do is concentrate on the things people do in order to achieve this state of predictableness.
The easiest route to guaranteeing predictability is to control the market, have a monopoly. Many companies have tried this in the past, many continue to try this, despite legislation and regulation to prevent this. It is easier to do this in some jurisdictions rather than others; surprisingly, it would appear that some companies in “developed” countries seem to be as adept in sustaining monopolies while pretending to be otherwise, as their emerging-nation counterparts: the processes get more sophisticated and get called lobbying rather than bribing, but the outcome’s the same. Nevertheless, global monopolies are hard to sustain: artificial scarcities (eg region coding on DVDs) get met by artificial abundances (eg chipping of DVD players).
If you can’t have a monopoly, the next thing you do in your quest for predictability is to try and control your customer, make it hard for the customer to leave you. This is not surprising, since financial backers (quite possibly the ones wanting the predictability in the first place) are trained to ask “where’s your lock-in” as part of Due Diligence 101. Overt ways of controlling the customer start looking anti-competitive; as a result, the practice has begin to ease, although there are worrying signs that it will resurge in the guise of customer data import and export.
If you can’t lock in your customer, then you do the next best thing. You convince yourself you have predictability. You use a variety of financial and reporting tools to sustain this pretence, often under the guise of “risk management”. [In this context, I would strongly recommend you read Michael Power’s The Risk Management of Everything, a wonderful little tract that you can download for free here.] Sometimes when I look at everything that happened in the financial markets, I cannot help but feel that the same principles that Clay Shirky speaks of in The Collapse of Complex Business Models applies in modern financial markets. The problem with this approach is that you land up having no defence for “black swans”. In fact I would go so far as to state that the process of pretending predictability is one that systemically creates and increases black swan risk.
If you can’t convince yourself, then it all begans to unravel. Because you’re left with the temptation to convince others of the predictable nature of business while not being convinced yourself. Why? Because “push” organisations work on this basis of precision in predictability. The techniques people use to “convince” others in this respect are immoral at the very least and illegal at the extreme.
Institutions, particularly “push” institutions,  have grown up on the mother’s milk of predictability, of smoothed-out forecasts, of a level of precision that is no longer sustainable in a “Pull” world. They’ve resorted to using an extensive variety of techniques to try and hold on to that predictability; some of them are sustainable in the short term, some of them are downright illegal, none of them have any real value in the long term.
Which brings me to the question that’s keeping me awake. Can a traditional Push institution really become a Pull institution, bearing all this in mind? is that transition, that hybrid state,  really possible? how long can one institution uphold two sets of radically different principles under one style of management?
I tried to imagine a Push institution outsourcing work to a Pull institution, to try and understand what the working agreement would look like. And I didn’t like the answer.
Comments and advice welcome.

Of Push and Pull

My thanks to Bob Davidson (oybay on flickr) for letting me use the wonderful shot above.

Those of you who know me well will also know that I have had a soft spot for the writings of John Seely Brown and John Hagel for some time now. [I’ve found 15 mentions of the word “Seely” alone in the past five years].  The Social Life of Information is one of the most important books I’ve read in the past 20 years. Similarly, ever since I saw the two Johns present the findings that formed the material for The Only Sustainable Edge, I’ve been tracking what they’ve been doing with keen interest.

I’ve had the privilege of meeting both of them over the years; more recently, I’ve been able to spend some quality time with John Hagel, usually at conferences we were both speaking at, sometimes even on the same panel. Which is why I feel truly honoured to have been named one of the original “edgerati” by them. They define edgerati as follows:

More about the edgerati later. Not today, other than to say that it’s a mind-boggling list of people, comprising many of my heroes both dead and alive, and to remark that it feels lonely to be one of the few large-enterprise people on it. But today is not about the edgerati.

Today is about something else. It’s about The Power of Pull, written by John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison, one of the best books I’ve read in a very long time. And I read a lot. As many of you know.

In a farsighted article over 13 years ago, James Gleick wrote this:

….the promotion of Push is the silliest piece of puffery to waft along in several seasons. In fact, Push is nothing more than a thinly disguised return to ideas of information delivery that the Internet has made obsolete. The failure of Push is preordained.

Gleick was talking about the push and pull of information. The Power of Pull is about much more than that. It’s majestic, momentous, almost a grand unified theory of a number of themes you will be familiar with.

The theory of the firm and the future of work

There’s an underlying theme throughout the book that touches on the theory of the firm, its raison d’etre, its structure, format and workflow. N. “Venkat” Venkatraman, a Boston professor I have a lot of time for, told me many years ago that business used to be about hierarchies of products and customers, and is now about networks of relationships and capabilities. John Roberts sought to extend that theme in The Modern Firm. Tom Malone did a splendid job of exposing us to how work would change in The Future of Work, and continues to look at this very carefully at the Center for Collective Intelligence, where I am privileged to be able to join him and support him every now and then. People interested in this subject should read the books listed above. [Disclosure: Both Tom and Venkat are good friends and regular dinner companions.]

What this book does is to extend Big Shift thinking into a detailed analysis of what it means to move from a static “stocks”-based view of the firm to a dynamic “flows”-based view, the radical compression of product/service lifecycles this represents, and the imperative to concentrate on refreshing stocks by participating in flows. [They also raise very serious questions on the whole concept of Intellectual Property Rights as a result]. I quote:

“Refreshing the stocks of what we know by participating in flows of new knowledge is fundamental to performance improvement, no matter the endeavour, both for individuals and, more broadly, for institutions”.

The collapse of old models: changes in the flow of work

Two of my other favourite East Coast thinkers, Andrew McAfee and Clay Shirky, have both been covering the collapse of old models from different perspectives. Andrew, with Enterprise 2.0, and Clay, with Here Comes Everybody, both look at the changes taking place at work and in society as a result of what Tim O’Reilly branded Web 2.0. Again, if you’re interested in this subject, you should really go out and get their books. [Disclosure: Andrew spent some time studying my department and organisation when preparing the case studies that would later become the book, and is a friend and regular dinner companion. Clay is also a friend, thought I don’t get to see him that often].

Clay’s recent thought-provoking writings on the collapse of complex business models are also worth reading in this context.

In the Power of Pull, what the authors do is to place the importance of the new tools in the context of “creation spaces”, analogous to mashing the McAfee and Shirky ideas into the area usually reserved for the agile and lean-programming people. I quote:

We believe that in the digital age, as social networking sites, powerful search engines and the like continue to exert their democratising influences, the power of pull will become the governing principle for success, and, that those who learn how to use these tools and methods most effectively are the ones who will pull their influence into a new age of higher performance and achievement, often through the use of edge practices at the core.

The book places a lot of emphasis on how learning is improved as a result of our having better sharing tools. What do I mean? Take an example from my own life, recently. On Friday night, a little over a week ago, I went for a long walk on Mount Tamalpais with Howard Rheingold and Kevin Marks. A wonderful, relaxed-yet-bracing walk along trodden and untrodden ways. The tools we have today make it easy for me to share precisely what we did (and, importantly, make it possible for me to repeat that walk with my family some other time!).

Here’s what we did, also visible from this url: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=200218344844629065129.00048465450c61e15c44f:

From transactional to relational

From a completely different angle, Doc Searls, Christopher Locke, David Weinberger and Rick Levine took the world of work apart a decade ago with The Cluetrain Manifesto, and continue to do so. They looked more closely at the relationship between the firm and its customers and the need for change there. Again, a must-read book, recently republished in a 10th Anniversary edition (in which yours truly has a guest chapter, to boot).

In the Power of Pull, the very concept of transaction costs is brought into question as part of the stocks-to-flows shift, raising the prospect that the cost of creating and maintaining relationships becomes far more important. [Here, maybe it’s my interpretation, but I felt the authors had sympathy for my view that the Dunbar number is higher as a result of technological advances, particularly in communications and their persistence, archivability and searchability].

Emergence and serendipity

Two more related themes come into play, themes introduced to me by people as varied as Steven Berlin Johnson (with Emergence), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (with Flow) and Malcolm Gladwell (with Blink).

Tellingly, the authors of The Power of Pull extend the concept of relationship- and attraction-based “spikes” in geographical skill concentration (at least one of the reasons why BT bought Ribbit in Silicon Valley rather than choose firms elsewhere. I should know: I work for BT and chair Ribbit on their behalf). They tie this relational value to improving the probability of serendipitous events, increasing both the likelihood and quality of encounters between high-performing people in such spikes.

The value of serendipity is also exhibited in examples of how learning takes place at the edge, how people apply learning from adjacencies to solving new problems. My favourite recent example is this, the train that doesn’t stop at stations:

My thanks to kottke.org for the example, which you can read about here. I just love the way that concepts I would normally encounter on a running track get transferred over to the rail track. Brilliant.

I could have chosen a series of other themes that are interwoven in the book, but then this review will have become unmanageable and unreadable. Suffice it to say that they would have included the diminishing-returns aspect of the experience curve, changing education, communities and opensource, and work-life balance.

All this is brought together in a way that is simply majestic, reminiscent of the way Esther Dyson took my breath away with Release 2.0 over a decade ago, or as Carlota Perez did with Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital a few years later.

So. In summary. The Power of Pull is a masterful book, bringing together many disparate strands of thinking over the years, placing them in a grounded, measured manner within the context of the institution. It helps us move from the decreasing-returns transaction-costs hierarchical closed model of the enterprise to an increasing-returns abundance-economy networked and open model. It helps us understand the move from stocks to flows, how the boundaries of the firm must change as a result, what will happen to firms that don’t. How the right talent is attracted, how serendipitous value is created by that attraction and consequent spiking.

As you may have gathered from this review, I’ve been following many of the trends and themes in the book in their original streams. That in turn may have sensitised me, my anchors and frames and biases may have blinded me. If this review makes you think that is the case, my apologies.

Because that was not my intention.

My intention was to HOLLER: go out and buy this book, read it and read it again before your competitors do.

Why? Because it puts a lot of things in context, eloquently and enjoyably. Because, as the authors say, something fundamental is broken and needs fixing. Because the creation-space idea is fundamental to anyone who wants to understand how platform-based services organisations work. Or should work.

So don’t make me holler any more. Go out. Buy the book. Read it.

Thinking about #ashtags

Interesting times. I’m in San Francisco on Ribbit work, and it looks like I might be here for some time, thanks to the fallout from the Icelandic volcanic eruptions. I’m scheduled to fly out Tuesday, let’s see what happens. No point fretting about what I cannot change.

There’s always a bright side. Like finding out that the hashtag for related incidents is #ashtag. Or discovering this site, flightradar24, which plots the positions of all planes in the air, identifying each plane by its callsign. Blue crosses are airports. Yellow planes are … you guessed it.