When I started talking about the Four Pillars model (search, syndication, conversation and fulfilment) four or five years ago, I had some very specific views about syndication. And, as I see the new generation start entering the workforce, if anything those views have been reinforced.

Let’s take reports and enquiries. In this context, when I use the word “report”, I mean something paper-based, chundered out of a giant enterprise system. And when I use the word “enquiry” I mean something that is similarly yawned out, but online rather than on paper. Both these things come in two flavours, regular and ad-hoc. If you haven’t had to come across such things so far, count your lucky stars.

When I started working in the industry, listing paper grew on trees. And global warming was but a glint in Al Gore’s eye (he was 32!). I was surrounded by ream after ream of paper, green-lined and perforated, in a size I would have guessed as A3-ish. Your desk was dominated by large “trays” marked IN and OUT and, if you were important, maybe even one called URGENT. Sometimes you were even more important, you could decide to suspend work, you had a tray marked PENDING. When you “arrived”, became someone, you were probably given a tray marked FILING, with a person to do that job for you. This usually happened around the time you had the Ceremony of the Keys, when you were finally allowed to use the Executive Toilet. [That’s if you were male, of course.]

But I digress. IN trays. Reams of listing paper. I used to watch what happened to that listing paper with some bemusement. It arrived magically in on a desk in the morning, patiently gathering dust and meeting like-minded reams for a few days. Then, when the pile grew too high, it would get moved. To the floor alongside the desk, en route being junked.

I kid you not. Offices (we didn’t use words like “enterprise” in those days) were full of printed reports that seemed unstoppable, they had a life of their own. They’d get produced, hang around for a while and then get junked.

The advent of the PC and the AT bus changed all that, we stopped using terms like “console printer” and “dot matrix printer” and settled down to the good old laser printer. [I think inkjet and bubble came around the same time, but I was a laser man myself. You haven’t lived until you’ve changed a ribbon on a free-standing console printer.]

So much for the reports of yesteryear. When it came to enquiries it was more of the same, except that you didn’t have reams of paper. Instead you had a new problem. Or rather a new opportunity. You could spend your life figuring out how many ways there were to get the response “Invalid Code”. No more, no less.

Some people think that sticking decal-like things on your computer is a very cool Generation M thing to do. Not true. People were sticking things to the side of their 80×24 dumb terminals thirty years ago. But what they stuck was different indeed. They were lists of “valid codes”, usually scribbled on paper and sellotaped on to the side of the terminal.

You see them nowadays as well, often at cashtills.

What’s the point of all this? Where am I leading? It’s simple. Syndication in the past was a complete nightmare. if you asked for reports you got broadcast grapeshot that then became impossible to turn off. If you asked for enquiries you dealt with unforgiving deterministic forms. The upshot was the same: no personalisation, a firehose that won’t turn off, a deterministic rather than probabilistic process of enquiry, intolerant and not fit for purpose.

Why did I put up with it? I had no alternative. Worse than that, I hadn’t ever seen an alternative.

Well, today’s kids are different. Generation M is different. The generation entering the workforce is different. They are used to RSS, to feed readers, to Google, to iGoogle, to Netvibes, to Pipes, to relevance and ranking, to wild cards.

And they won’t put up with our trashy way of doing things.

Not even for money.

So next time you look at a humongous monolithic system using arcane meaningless codes and chundering out pages of tripe, start planning to replace it. That’s if you want to attract employees from the coming generations.

And by the way, do bear this in mind: Generation M has no border: India and China and Chile and Mexico and Russia also have kids who think the same way. You’re not going to be able to offshore this sucker for long.

Here’s the start of the wikipedia entry for Moore’s Law:

Moore’s law describes an important trend in the history of computer hardware: that the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit is increasing exponentially, doubling approximately every two years.^[1] The observation was first made by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore in a 1965 paper.^[2][3][4] The trend has continued for more than half a century and is not expected to stop for another decade at least and perhaps much longer.^[5]

Here’s the diagram that tends to go alongside such text, also from Wikipedia:

The trouble with all this is that normal people are not necessarily used to log scales, nor to statements about exponential growth in the capacity for placing inexpensive transistors in an integrated circuit. Which means that people’s eyes glaze over when I start talking to them about Moore’s Law. [Well actually most people make sure their eyes glaze over as soon as I start talking, regardless of subject, but that’s another matter.]

Where was I? Oh yes. Moore and his Law. I find this a simpler way of explaining it:

The chart above tracks the price per gigabyte storage in an iPod, and how that has varied over the years and generations. I’ve been using it for a while, and now it’s getting a little dated. Haven’t seen a more recent version, I sourced the chart from a James Stoup article in AppleMatters a few years ago.

If anyone has a more recent iPod/iPhone version i’d love to see it. Comments? Views? Have you found better ways of explaining Moore’s Law to my grandmother?

I cannot be in Washington DC on the 23rd of this month. And as a result, I’m already looking forward to a webcast of something that’s happening at the Library of Congress that day.

Yes, this is an unashamed advertisement. For someone I don’t know, have never met, and in whose business I have no stake. But I have enjoyed the things he has been doing with his class, particularly the things he has done with YouTube and Twitter.

Dr Michael Wesch, yes he of The Machine is Us/ing Us and A Vision of Students Today, will be speaking on the Anthropology of YouTube. I quote from the Library of Congress news release:

More video material has been uploaded to YouTube in the past six months than has ever been aired on all major networks combined, according to cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch. About 88 percent is new and original content, most of which has been created by people formerly known as “the audience.”

Wesch will discuss the three-year-old video-sharing Web site in a lecture titled “The Anthropology of YouTube” at 4 p.m. on Monday, June 23, in the Montpelier Room on the sixth floor of the Library of Congress’ James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C.

Wesch and his classes have been doing some very interesting things with YouTube and with Twitter. (See for example his post on teaching with Twitter a few months ago.). Actually there are many people doing very interesting things with twitter, what makes Wesch and his classes different is that they capture and articulate what they do very well. And then they share their articulation.

I’m fascinated by the behaviour of digital natives; I try and understand them every chance I get, usually by watching my children; I feel I now know a little about how the dinosaurs must have felt when they foresaw their own deaths.

If any of you do get to see him speak, let me know if you plan to tweet it.

Incidentally, I’m also looking forward to seeing/hearing the Douglas Rushkoff lecture on Open Source Reality scheduled for the end of the month.

I’m delighted to hear that the BT Web21C SDK team has just won the eWEEK Excellence Award for Application Development, seeing off competition from Salesforce amongst others. Open multisided platforms are the way, and it’s great to see colleagues being honoured. Well done to the team. Full story here.

Disclaimer: I work for BT. And this is not an advertisement. Just a personal vote of thanks to the team.

So you’re finding someone’s changed his tweet frequency, he’s tweeting too often for your liking? Maybe he’s got on his high horse about something and he can’t let go. And you just wish you could tune him out for a brief period?

Help is at hand. Look at this:

TwitterSnooze. Personalised short-term filtering out of someone. Now all I need is the same thing for a something and not a someone. When I can choose to tune out tweets about a particular subject or topic or entity, for a short while. [Yes it can be tag-driven if required].