Category: Four pillars

I’ve been spending a few months quietly and slowly reading Representing Calcutta by Swati Chattopadhyay. Fascinating book; it’s an ambitious work, dealing with complex issues to do with how colonial cities are really formed, how the cultures collide and merge, how our perceptions of the history of great colonial cities have been influenced by the colonist views nad hostories. Incidentally, it’s the first time I’ve had the chance to link to a Kindle version of a book. Wonder how often I’ll get to do that.

Professor Chattopadhyay questions a commonly held view of many colonial cities, the tendency to divide a city into coloniser and native areas. I agree with her, everything I know and feel about Calcutta, everything I’ve learnt about it, says that it has always been a melted pot city. What’s a melted pot city? Just a term I like using to describe a place that’s been a melting pot for many generations.

This tendency to make grey things black and white is not just a yesterday thing. We do it today. We like doing things like joking about America as consisting of the United States of Canada and Jesusland, of blue and red states.

The electoral college approach, if anything, exacerbates that view, despite the attempts of Maine and Nebraska to soften it. Those two states use the Congressional District method of distributing their electoral votes in presidential elections, Maine since 1972 and Nebraska since 1996. So far it hasn’t made a difference, but when I last looked, there was the possibility that Nebraska would actually return a split vote.

Quite a few people I speak to have this perception that people in blue states are blue, that people in red states are red. That this geographical separation is political and religious and intellectual and I don’t know what else, a San Andreas fault that creates deep fissures across their nation. Such people find it hard to understand how California elected Obama and at the same time passed Proposition 8. That’s because Californians are purple, not blue.

If you take a look at the 2004 election results at a level of granularity smaller than “state”, this is what you get:

Somewhat different from this representation:

[My thanks to this site for the diagrams.]

America’s a collection of purple states, a united collection of purple states. With purple districts and purple cities, purple streets, even purple households. And a smattering of purple people. Not red, not blue.

I think at least one of the points that Swati Chattopadhyay is that Calcutta was and is and will continue to be a purple city. A city where the mediation of public spaces and spheres isn’t quite as static as Habermas supposed; a city made up of societies with seriously blurred edges. As the book avers, at least part of this blurring took place as a result of race and gender equality, but there was always blurring to begin with. Blurred edges make control freaks deeply unhappy, so it’s not surprising that colonial powers sought to pretend that the blurring wasn’t happening.

Doc Searls, in a recent post, made reference to something Dave Barry said:

I miss 1960. Not the part about my face turning overnight into the world’s most productive zit farm. What I miss is the way the grown-ups acted about the Kennedy-Nixon race. Like the McCain-Obama race, that was a big historic deal that aroused strong feelings in the voters. This included my parents and their friends, who were fairly evenly divided, and very passionate. They’d have these major honking arguments at their cocktail parties. But unlike today, when people wear out their upper lips sneering at those who disagree with them, the 1960s grown-ups of my memory, whoever they voted for, continued to respect each other and remain good friends.

What was their secret? Gin. On any given Saturday night they consumed enough martinis to fuel an assault helicopter. But also they were capable of understanding a concept that we seem to have lost, which is that people who disagree with you politically are not necessarily evil or stupid. My parents and their friends took it for granted that most people were fundamentally decent and wanted the best for the country. So they argued by sincerely (if loudly) trying to persuade each other. They did not argue by calling each other names, which is pointless and childish, and which constitutes I would estimate 97 percent of what passes for political debate today.

If I’ve interpreted him correctly, Barry’s assertion was that in the 1960s, people could be passionate about their beliefs, argue about them and yet remain firm friends. That for some reason it doesn’t happen today.

I’m not that sure. People are purple. I think what has changed is that the media make a lot more out of the differences, that the nature of media today tends to accentuate the differences so much that we feel things have changed.

All this sort of reminds me of the descriptions of the adda in Chattopadhyay’s book:

The adda with its non-fixity of topic of discussion and even of space (not all addas had fixed space) may be seen as a critique of the more rational forms of “getting together”, the sabhas and samitis, organisations that had a defined agenda for their meetings. The term adda only began to be used in this sense in the last decade of the nineteenth century. […..] The nature of orality changed, however, once the adda was removed from the baithak-khana (which received its name from an old banyan tree which stood at its eastern extremity and formed a resting and meeting place for caravans of merchants who traded in Calcutta) to the cafes of the early twentieth-century city. What was retained, even enhanced, in the process was the affect of communal speech; speech as passionate, multi-sensory experience, an occasion for heated discussion, its spontaneous and raucous nature far exceeding any yardstick of reasoned debate.

Speech as passionate, multi-sensory experience, an occasion for heated discussion, its spontaneous and raucous nature far exceeding any yardstick of reasoned debate.

That’s what I sensed when I first started reading Christopher Locke’s Entropy Gradient Reversals, my route towards getting interested in blogs. For those looking for spontaneity, raucousness, heat, RageBoy was a good place to start. That laid the groundwork for Cluetrain, by which time I had managed to convince myself that the blogosphere was the adda of the 21st century. Which it is. More accurately, the blogosphere was a collection of addas, of baithak-khanas, a place where one could roam from adda to adda with a minimum of fuss, a place where the conversations you missed were recorded and archived and retrievable.

There is something about the adda that makes it inclusive. For ever and a day, there have been attempts to make addas exclusive. Exclusive in social class terms, in intellectual terms, in gender terms, and even in race terms. I’ve seen similar attempts in the blogosphere, all doomed to fail. And they have.

The adda is alive and well and blooming in the blogosphere.

The blogosphere is alive and well and bloomful of addas.

Who saw him die?

I, said the Fly

With my little eye,

I saw him die.

Cock Robin (nursery rhyme)

The Fly was lucky. My little eye isn’t doing too well. How come? Apparently the blogosphere has died and gone somewhere over the past few years, and I missed it. Completely. I did not see it die.

So what did I miss? Nicholas Carr gives a reasoned view of the demise of the blog in this post. Even though I don’t always agree with him, his is a must-read blog. Let me try and summarise what he says in the post:

• Blogs are about two things, a style of writing and a set of tools.
• If we concentrate on the style of writing, there’s been considerable change over the past few years.
• The top blogs are now indistinguishable from mainstream news sites, down to landing page bloat and authorship by collections of professional writers.
• Even if we include these collective pro-blogs, the actual number of blogs updated regularly is low, 7.4 million in the last 120 days and 1.5 million in the last week.
• Different in style. Dominated by professionals. Indistinguishable from mainstream. High dormant rate.

Doesn’t sound too alive, does it?

I’m not so sure, I guess I see things differently.

Why do I say that? There are a number of reasons.

Growing irrelevance of the Technorati Top 100

I used to read a lot of people who were in the Technorati top 100. I don’t any more. Not because I’ve stopped reading them. But because they aren’t in the top 100 any more. Let’s look at what changed here. The people I used to read are still blogging. They haven’t stopped. So what has changed? What changed is that they stopped caring about their Technorati ranking. They were relaxed about changing their blog addresses, they blogged in more than one place, they blogged in more than one way. Rankings fell away.

Move towards aggregation

As the blogosphere was infiltrated by the mainstream, one of the tendencies I noticed was that a number of people that I used to read as individuals began to blog as groups. My guess is that it was a way to counter the attack of the mainstream. Many of the blogs in the top 100 are actually mainstream pseudoblogs; those that are authentic blogs are often multi-author blogs. The number of authentic blogs in the top 100 reduced as a result.

Reaction to trolls

As the blogosphere grew, so did the misuse of links. There were more and more instances of self-publicity through self-linking, trolling became more common, the ranking systems started getting gamed. One of the common reactions was to move away from “link love” and blogrolls and suchlike. That in turn affected rankings.

Growth in microblogging

As the blogosphere grew and began to get to Main Street, it started spawning other ways of blogging. Principal amongst this was Twitter, which some people see as microblogging. One thing’s for sure: Twitter sucked away a lot of the mini-posts people did in their blogs, which had two consequences. The average length of the blog post grew as a result; and the frequency of update of blogs fell away. That affected some of the statistics we are seeing.

People stopping blogging?

I’ve tried to think hard about all the people I read at the turn of the century, those I read when Technorati started ranking them (late 2002? early 2003?) , and those I read now. And you know something? I think I can come up with two names of people who aren’t posting as much now. Kathy Sierra. Clay Shirky. [And I am privileged to be able to say that in both cases, the conversation has continued. In person. And it probably wouldn’t have continued if I hadn’t continued to blog. Both of them have their reasons for changing their style and frequency of blogging, both of them have every right to those reasons. But their actions do not represent the death of blogging. Clay continues to do so via Here Comes Everybody. Kathy continues to be quiet, and has her reasons. We should respect them].

Maybe Nicholas Carr is right. Maybe all those who claim blogging is dead are right. I don’t know about that. But here’s what I think:

Most of the people who started blogging continue to blog, and that number is growing. It’s growing slowly as the blogosphere matures. There are a large number of dormant blogs, but that has always been the case. Always. There has been a change in the blogosphere when viewed through the lens of the Technorati 100, but that is because the ranking is irrelevant, not because people have stopped blogging. There has been an impact on size of post and frequency of update as a result of the growth of microblogging, but that should be seen as an extension of the blogosphere and not in competition with it. Twitter is part of the blogosphere.

I, said the Fly? I think not. The death of the blogosphere has more to do with the death of Mark Twain than that of Cock Robin.

Guess this one is getting too close to call.

A number of people brought this site, SayHear, to my attention at the weekend. Go take a look at it, and, especially if you’re reading this in the US, go further. Call the appropriate number and tell people why you’re going to vote for your selection.

So what is the site about? Well, you choose a number to ring based on your voting intention, then leave a message explaining why. You could indicate your intention not to vote as well. The colours of the box represent the voting intention. The information in the box represented where you were calling from. And the information “under” the box stored your voice message for others to click on and replay. Simple yet powerful.

What I particularly liked about the site was the simplicity of the idea and of the visualisation. Rich information, presented in a manner that made consumption of that information intuitive and easy. Colour codes that were consistent with external “standards”. Metadata, the area codes, also consistent with external standards. Information in text form enriched by the embedding of another form of information, that of the “voice file” at each point.

Many possibilities open up. For example, you could take “incoming calls” and represent the options the caller chose by using colour and size and shape, build a variant on a tag cloud. You could choose some other way of displaying call duration. You could associate the “box” so created not just with the speech file, but also the transcript. The capacity to use visualisation to reduce firehoses of information into manageable streams, that capacity has been around for a long time. What is new is the ability to mix and match different types of information while doing that. What is new is the platform used to deliver it.

[Note: I’m biased. The guys who designed and delivered this, Gershoni and Some Random Dude, are completely unknown to me. But the platform they used, Ribbit, is very much known to me. BT bought the company a few months ago, and I have the privilege of serving as its chairman.]

In a networked world, open innovation thrives when open platforms exist. What you see above is the shape of things to come. To echo the words of David Weinberger, small pieces loosely joined, joined to create value that could not have been created any other way.

Bonus link: I found this site an interesting read, both from a visualisation perspective as well as from the viewpoint of education in general.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed that my reading has become more and more heterogeneous and spread out; there has been a perceptible shift away from an A-list approach to a Long Tail, avoiding the “hit culture” implied by A-list approaches.

During that same period, there have been a number of articles about the death of Facebook and, for that matter, the death of blogging. [An aside: When you’re in a position to select the metrics you can “prove” almost anything. I have seen so many business cases that beggar belief, so many presentations written ostensibly by Messrs Andersen and Grimm].

I think the exact opposite is happening, that blogging is becoming mainstream rather than dying. And the same with Facebook.

I have some views on the why, and would love to know what you think about it. So here goes:

There was a time when the barriers to entry to the world of publishing were high, very high. That led to a situation where people who wrote (and were published) belonged to an exclusive class. Then along came the web and the blogosphere, and the barriers began to come down. But not that much. Let’s say this was around 1999. Blogging was still something done by a small group of people with good connectivity and the skills to use relatively technical tools. Readership was based on word of mouse, and so things remained relatively cliquey.

As the barriers came down further, as tools became easier to use, there was a level of democratisation. By this time, let’s say it was around 2003, better tools were emerging, Technorati had a job to do, blogs were mushrooming. Access was still not that great, and people used to say that the blogosphere was an echo chamber. Terms like A-lister flew around; a small number of people even acted like A-listers.

And then we come to now. A blogosphere that is becoming mainstream and therefore getting written off, apparently. Wrong. Because what is happening is this.

First was word of mouse. Then we had the blogroll. That was followed by OPML files. Which in turn were succeeded by sharing feeds via aggregator/readers like Netvibes.

Access to the world of the participative blogger became easier every step of the way. The way I discovered new writers changed, the way I tended my list of people to read changed. Cliques and echo chambers were replaced by the Long Tail.

The word of mouse was by definition cliquey. When it was the blogroll you had to know about it before you used it. OPML was also a barrier to entry. Netvibes and its competitors made things easier.

But what really changed things was Facebook. And then Twitter. And now FriendFeed. Communities with very low barriers to entry that allowed people to share what they wrote.

Share, but not on a broadcast basis.

Share, on a publish-subscribe basis.

That power now runs through many things we do, and I don’t think we really understand what we have. It is powerful, it enriches, it enlivens, it democratises.

People will discover Twitter and Friendfeed and their successors in the same way as they discovered blogging. And when they do, when they see the power of pub-sub, the blogosphere will become even more mainstream. Because barriers to entry and access will continue to fall, the risk of cliquism will reduce, the cost of discovering who and what you like will become negligible, the tools to manage your reading will keep getting better. All enhanced by the power of pub-sub.

Choosing what you want on a granular basis. Selecting the capillaries you like and discarding the rest. Weeding your river of reading.