Calcutta used to be called a city of palaces. Surprised?  You shouldn’t be. Not that long ago, Calcutta had views and vistas like the ones below, illustrated by the Daniells:

I love Calcutta. And it’s rare that I meet someone who’s lived there and who doesn’t share that love. Yet, as the city has evolved over the years, even the biased observer would be forced to admit that not everything is perfect.

I’ve had the opportunity to spend time in many great cities over the years; there’s something about them that continues to fascinate me.

The writings of two incredible people, Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander, if anything, served to accentuate and sharpen my interest. I would particularly cite The Death and Life of Great American Cities and A Pattern Language to those who are interested.

For many years now, I’ve wondered what it would feel like to build a great city from scratch. How to make sure it is alive, organic, adaptable, real. Now, thanks to friend Sabeer Bhatia, I have the chance to find out, albeit vicariously.

He thinks big. Very big. He’s taken on an amazing project, Nanocity. Here’s a quote from the web site:

To develop a sustainable city with world class infrastructure and to create an ecosystem for innovation leading to economy, ecology and social cohesion

Go take a look at the site and try and understand the scale of the project. 11,000 acres, the size of Manhattan, between two rivers. A stone’s throw from Delhi.

Sabeer thinks big. And I wish him well.

I like thinking about things. Savouring them as I roll them around my head, tasting them, mulling over them. Ruminating. Masticating.

I like thinking about things in themes. What do I mean? Let’s take an example. A recent Harvard Business Review article asked if we should Invest in the Long Tail. Apparently, research had shown that even in a long-tail world, blockbusters continued to exist and were of significance. Chris Anderson wrote a response pointing out the importance of getting the definitions right, and showed how, in his opinion, the research was consistent with the theory. And a whole conversation started.

Reading all that set me thinking. It made me go back to the oft-quoted Clay Shirky article on Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality, serendipitously referred to a couple of days ago, in a post by Hugh Macleod on, of all things, cloud computing.

And this is what I’m thinking about:

1. In a broadcast age where the power of distribution lay in the hands of a select few, there were blockbusters.

2. In the internet age, where the power of distribution is less narrowly held, there continue to be blockbusters.

3. The blockbusters are different. They come from different motives, give rise to different opportunities, form part of different business models. Let’s call the broadcast blockbusters Type A blockbusters, and the internet blockbusters Type B blockbusters.

4. When the power of distribution is narrowly held, someone else chooses the blockbuster, then uses advertising, availability and proximity to try and self-fulfil the prophecy. Sometimes that succeeds, sometimes not. We all have our Waterworlds to bear.

5. When the power of distribution is democratised, everything changes. Now the blockbuster is about power laws rather than self-fulfilling prophecies.

The moral of the story is this: You could game a Type A blockbuster. You can’t game the Type B blockbuster. [This is what I’m thinking about; this post is as provisional as any other post I write].

You may have noticed that I push back against badly designed DRM and IPR. There are many reasons: I am not in favour of laws that treat everyone like criminals; I do not believe that the internet is primarily a vehicle built for Hollywood to distribute its “content” while protecting itself against “criminals”; I believe that intellectual property legislation is dated, irrelevant, no longer fit for purpose and inherently unusable; I could go on and on.

It’s not just about intellectual property. The same is true when it comes to discussions about the other two “i” words, identity and the internet. For identity also read privacy, for the internet also read net neutrality.

Where all this comes together is in the context of waste. Wasted opportunities, particularly in education, in healthcare and in government, opportunities wasted because people, often ill-informed, make decisions, often ill-judged, that continue to treat the internet as an extension of Hollywood, the music industry and publishers. And, buoyed up with the moral indignation that precedes such actions, and by the self-satisfaction that succeeds them, it is normal and understandable that nanny-state decisions then follow.

Which is why I found what Bill Thompson wrote instructive. Do take a look at a recent post by him in Index on Censorship, headlined Fools Rush in Where Programmers Fear to Tread. I particularly like this bit:

The real danger is not that politicians ask for things that the current network architecture cannot support, but that the network could be changed to make those things possible.

The Web is live, it is two-way, it is writeable. That is what makes it the Web, its interactive participative nature. The value proposition of the web in education, in healthcare and in government relies on this two-way-ness.

The Web is not about broadcast, it is not about access control, it is not about audiences and content. It’s not about Publishing 1.0, or for that matter Publishing 0.0.

If the people who make such decisions insist on using the metaphor of the Information Superhighway, then let us try and stop them from putting cattle grids every 100 yards. Because that is what is happening. Cattle grids that slow us down, make us more vulnerable to attacks from highwaymen.

There is one overarching reason. The waste of it all.

Cloudy
My thoughts are scattered and they’re
Cloudy
They have no borders, no boundaries
They echo and they swell
From Tolstoy to Tinker Bell

Simon and Garfunkel, Cloudy

Hugh has a great post on “the cloud” today. One that should make all of us think. As Tim O’Reilly tweeted, this is an important post. Monkchips‘ observations here, as referenced by both Hugh and Tim, are worth reading.

I have always had this sense that there is no longer any room for artificial monopolies, that the market will provide a self-correcting mechanism. But I have always been wrong on this. We can argue about why this is so, but not about the fact. Microsoft, Google and Apple are facts.

Open standards, open platforms and open source are ways to prevent this happening. Ways to guarantee that history won’t repeat itself. But this needs coherent communal action, something that is hard to achieve in emergent environments.

Maybe the VRM community should take this on.

I started this post with a quote from a Simon and Garfunkel song. We need to make sure that what we do in cloud computing doesn’t sound like the end of that song:

They don’t know where they’re going/And, my friend/Neither do I.

So read Hugh’s post. Read what James Governor has to say. And help us all figure out how to prevent what would otherwise be the expected outcome.

[After publishing this post, I walked into the kitchen, to be greeted by Joni Mitchell singing Big Yellow Taxi. And it reminded me: I really don’t know clouds…..at all…..]

People working in the realm of information technology love polarising arguments, something I’ve touched upon a number of times. [Just type in “blefuscu” into the search box for the blog and you will see the posts]. Over the last five years or so, one of the arguments I have been fascinated by is that surrounding the value of “web 2.0” tools to the developing world. The question at the heart of the debate is simple, and germane to policymakers worldwide:

Is investment in technological infrastructure by itself a significant factor, when looking at the development needs of a country?

Morten Rask has been studying this question, and he put forward a number of hypotheses to be tested in answering it, looking at correlations across a number of factors. Here’s a graphical representation of his findings:

You can see the whole article here.

His conclusions are given below:

In spite of some claims, Wikipedia is generally more suitable for participants from developed countries. However, participants from less developed countries can benefit from involvement in Wikipedia. These findings contradict some of the promises (Cairncross, 1997; Friedman, 2006; Negroponte, 1995) discussed earlier in the paper. In contrast to some of the enthusiasm for Wikipedia — where only an Internet connection is a precondition for participation (Baumann, 2006; Economist, 2006d; Tapscott and Williams, 2006) — we conclude that an adequate technological infrastructure is not sufficient alone. These findings agree with earlier studies that recognized the importance of socioeconomic and other factors in e–business (Bouwman, 1999; Doern and Fey, 2006; Fesenmaier and van Es, 1999; Kraemer, et al., 2006; Steinfield and Klein, 1999; Steinfield, et al., 1999) and e–policy–making (Barzilai–Nahon, 2006; Kraemer, et al., 2006). For policy–makers, investments in technological infrastructure are not solely significant, but need to be considered along with improvements in literacy, education, and standard of living. For some businesses and other organizations, an examination of Wikipedia in specific markets can be useful as a screening and monitoring model.

My gut feel is that while most of the statements he makes are correct, his overall assertion is wrong. More specifically, I believe that the correlation between technological and economic factors needs to be looked into further. Rask uses the Human Development Index (HDI) as a proxy for “economic factors”, but I think in doing this he underestimates the recursive nature of that relationship: how the technological infrastructure itself directly influences the level of the HDI.

Rask’s work is structured and scientific, and should bear a lot more weight than my untutored assertion. It’s a hunch, nothing more. Having majored in Economics and Statistics at university, I am acutely aware that my assertion is weightless in comparison to the excellent work he’s done. So this is not an attempt to rubbish his work, but to suggest that a key conclusion bears more examination.

Why do I have this hunch? Simple. I have seen the impact of mobile telephones in developing countries, and I believe in that particular context that it is very simple to prove that the very act of investing in that technical infrastructure pushes the HDI up significantly. Any offers?

I think people underestimate the economic, social and political value of affordable connectivity; that the individual hypotheses in Rask’s work are all correct and not surprising at all; that at least one of the key conclusions he draws deserves further analysis, because of the recursive nature of the correlative relationship he relies on, that between technological infrastructure and HDI.

Only connect.