Category: Social software

More on the need for accuracy in words and terms and metaphors

I just came across this by Jon Udell. Well worth a read.

Unless we get the words and images right, we are going to face many uphill struggles, maybe even upmountain ones. [See earlier post on blogs and anchors, frames and metaphors. ]

The importance of blogs in anchoring/framing and building metaphor

There are three big debates right now that will help shape or kill everything we care about.

  • What is the internet?
  • Who owns it and how do we pay for it?
  • What about the stuff that touches it, whatever it is, and how do we pay for that stuff?

I have taken part in many discussions on this and related issues, covering the web, telcos and cablecos, big media and music and film, copyright, intellectual property right and now digital right.

And all the debates boil down in the end to the words and images we use. if we are to protect what we care for, we need better arguments, better metaphors, better anchors and frames. And blogs are great tools to do just that.

Recent discussions about opensource and internet and the iTunes decision in France have only served to bring this out more glaringly to me.

So here’s another to throw into the pot: Dana Blankenhorn asking about the internet, following on from some posts in a separate “Cook Report conversation”. Well worth a read, just to see how much imagery matters.

Are we moving to a time when sticks and stones will hurt us less than words? Are we already there?

Blogging with children

It’s been that kind of Saturday. My central heating (which broke down last week) gets fixed, yippee. Liverpool beat Everton. Yippee twice.

And I come across this piece, Why I blog with kids. There’s a teacher somewhere who blogs with his kids. Thank you Clarence Fisher.

And reading the post takes me to another, which asks today “Why aren’t we all blogging?” And Nancy Mckeand, whose blog it is, subtitles it “A first attempt at blogging with no idea where it will take me”.

Teachers who make themselves vulnerable in this way will succeed in their primary goal, to impart learning to their wards in order that potential may be reached, extended and released. Here’s to Clarence and Nancy…. and others out there I may never hear about.

Yippee thrice.

Blogs and organisational structures and Conway�s Law

Myrto Lazopoulou, who heads up the User Centred Design team where I work, pointed me at a recent post by Donald Norman reviewing Google’s usability. Who in turn led me to Mel Conway’s 1968 paper, which you can find here.

I found it fascinating. In Conway’s own words, his thesis can be summarised as follows:

Any organization which designs a system (defined more broadly here than just information systems) will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure

The implications are interesting. An organisation that uses blogs and wikis and IM on a level-free non-hierarchical basis, where collaboration takes place over time and distance and silo and culture, will in time produce designs for “Conway systems” that replicate the communications structure. Is an organisation chart a Conway system? Is collaboration really that subversive?

In isolation, perhaps. But the adoption of social software and collaborative tools is counterbalanced by opposing factors such as Sarbanes-Oxley and its ilk, which reinforce hierarchies. The complexity of corporate law and tax structures also forces regional entity obeisance, again underpinning hierarchy. What Seely Brown and Hagel witnessed in China, was it despite the operating structures rather than because of them? I wonder.
Which leads me down a Chandleresque path, in terms of his suggested interplay between strategy and structure. Something to think about, how modern communications cultures will influence the organisational structures of tomorrow, despite post-facto regulation.

Blogging, value and vulnerability: a postscript

Aqualung Ric makes the point that blogging is all about relationships, and that relationships are all about vulnerability.

Doc Searls was talking to me about a conversation he had with George Lakoff; somewhere out of that conversation, they defined blogging as rolling snowballs downhill in comparison with prior forms of multiperson live conversation which sometimes felt like rolling boulders uphill. Doc commented about the way the snowball has no “ownership” by the time it gets downhill.

This too is an important aspect of blogging, the co-creation of value. But the value that is co-created is not ownable in the traditional sense. There is a delayed gratification aspect to blogging, a Goleman-like emotional intelligence; you have to do what you feel is right rather than work out how you will “monetise” what you say. Ideas are free, it’s what you do with them that may be monetised over time.

Talking about Lakoff, I found his work on anchoring and framing very interesting; the subject was introduced to me some years ago by a colleague, James Montier, and also touched upon by Barry Schwartz. Lakoff’s point that framing is about ideas and values sits bang in the middle of this conversation.