Category: Four pillars

Over the years I’ve started to think harder about being “connected” by thinking harder about what it means not to be “connected”. By this I do not mean the traditional debate about the digital haves versus the digital have-nots, a discussion that soon goes down rabbitholes of economics-meets-education. By this I do not mean the traditional debate about net neutrality and cheap bits and expensive bits and who will pay, that’s another discussion that soon goes down the same rabbitholes, but with a twist of politics as well.

I mean something else altogether.

Today, I was sitting quietly in an exhibit that looked like a theatre in the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (known locally as MAMbo), waiting to see what happened next. I was the only person in this theatre-within-a-museum at the time. And what happened next was this. Two people, a man and a woman, started talking about their experiences of being blind. They talked about the difference between being blind from birth and becoming blind after having normal sight for a while. They talked about the role that memory played in that second instance, the memory of sight. How it became a frame of reference for many things later. How that memory decayed. How it played tricks.

And something about the way they spoke made me think of how kids today perceive being connected, particularly in the West, but increasingly in India and China as well.

You may gather from this that I think of being connected as an important thing. You’d be right. That’s why I wrote The Kernel For This Blog and About This Blog the way I did.

You see, I think connectivity, particularly ubiquitous always-on mobile connectivity, can make a real difference in terms of health, education and welfare, and that it can make a difference today. The days of “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers” and “there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home” are long gone. Today the BRICS have bricks in their hands, the bricks are getting smaller and they’re always on.

Too often, when people try and make this point, the objections are common and predictable. “You don’t get it, these people need food first. They’re starving.”. And so the debate about connectivity gets waylaid. Ironically, this is often done by people who then pump up the volume about the importance of biofuels in solving the energy crisis…. the same biofuels that then drive grain prices up and make staple food harder to afford for many people…..but that’s another debate.

All I was thinking was this. Is connectivity becoming like sight and hearing and speech and mobility? And if so what does that mean for the endless debates we appear to be having about what the internet and the web are?

[An aside. If I take this analogy in reverse, I land up in strange places. Told you I was confused. Like a year ago I spotted David Beckham at the Diana concert. With my bare eyes. Was I somehow trammelling over his image rights as a result? Should my eyes be cut out in order to feed the God of DRM? That’s the way a lot of DRM logic appears to me.]

I first came across this some four or five years ago, when researching the web for Rube Goldberg machines. But all I saw were references to the original Honda “Cog” advertisement. More recently, since maybe 2005, there have been a number of versions on the web. This one seems the most “official”, I only came across it recently while continuing with investigations into the Rube Goldberg space.

Worth seeing if you haven’t already done so.

Why am I looking into Rube Goldberg machines? Simple. Because one day I want to build a large “marble run meets Rube Goldberg meets Heath Robinson meets perpetuum mobile“. Told you it was simple.

Why then do I bother to talk about this in a blog “about information”? Because I think there are many lessons we can learn by digging into the making of the video. Lessons like what? Like maybe there is a “the physics are different” lesson to be learnt about software development meeting virtual world. Like maybe now that a critical part of Hollywood, post-production, is encamped firmly in Bollywood, the economics change as well.

Just musing. Comments welcome.

Over the last two years, I’ve been continuing with my research into open multisided platforms, particularly with a view to building community with them.

I’ve been privileged over the years to be associated with openadaptor, tiddlywiki and web21c; from the earliest moment I’ve tried to learn how to get out of the way and stay out of the way, while somehow remaining accountable. Sometimes I think we need a new term to describe the sort of soft-hands leadership required; the last time I tried, the best I could do was “tangential management”. But that’s another story.

I continue to think about open multisided platforms, and I’m sure there’s a lot I will learn in the process, particularly as friends and colleagues point me at people to talk to, books to read, articles to ponder over, sites to visit. And this has been happening.

For many years, it was hard to talk about open multisided platforms. Open source people don’t go looking for monetisation models, they solve problems. They make shoes, not money. So it was with open platforms. Whenever you mentioned them in conversation, the first question was not about the community but about the business model. And when you mentioned meta-models built around the community, in fact often built by the community, there was wailing and gnashing and glazings over. Which sort of killed the conversation.

Things have become a lot easier. Firstly, people are more willing and able to understand the importance of community, and of second-order business models built around the emergent community. But secondly and more importantly, articles like Better Than Free have helped remove the scales from their eyes (thank you Kevin Kelly).

Nowadays, when people talk about platforms, it is hard to avoid mentioning what’s been happening with Microsoft and Yahoo and Google. And it always reminds me of these three pictures I saw in an article by Henry Blodget. Read the whole article, it’s worth it. Even if you don’t agree with some of it.

They tell quite a story, don’t they? It’s going to be interesting, moving from the lock-in world to the open multisided world, a journey we have only just begun to take. A high-stakes table, as the charts above show.

… I plan to visit Kensal Green Cemetery again. Haven’t done so in over 25 years. The last time I did it, sometime in 1982, I didn’t get the chance to see all I wanted to. Some people have this real thing about cemeteries, I am not one of them. Until I discovered Kensal Green Cemetery, South Park Street Cemetery in Calcutta was the only one for me. It was close to where I was born, close to where I grew up, close to my school, close to my college, close to the people and things I cared about. There were many days when I went to visit friends “cutting through” the cemetery even though I didn’t need to, there was such a sense of history there.

Kensal Green Cemetery is in a different class. Here’s a sample of the people buried or cremated there:

Charles Babbage, the man behind the difference engine; Charles Blondin, acrobat and tightrope walker; Robert Brown (of Brownian motion fame); Isambard Kingdom Brunel; Wilkie Collins, of The Moonstone and The Woman In White; George Cruikshank, the Dickens illustrator; Leigh Hunt, the writer of Abou ben Adhem, whose tribe may increase; Freddie Mercury; Terence Rattigan of The Winslow Boy and Separate Tables; Howard Staunton, who gave us the Staunton chess pieces; William Makepeace Thackeray; Anthony Trollope, creator of Barsetshire.

And two other people. Thomas Daniell and his nephew William Daniell, the reasons why I went there in the first place. Here’s a sample of the Daniells’ output:

Calcutta used to be a City of Palaces. The Daniells were the ones that let me see what used to be, and what could be again, as I walked the streets in my youth. So I will go back to Kensal Green Cemetery sometime this month. And yes, I will be back at South Park Street as well, sometime in the next twelve months. Been too long.