Clarence Fisher alerted me to this:

A version of David Weinberger’s Small Pieces Loosely Joined for children. What a wonderful idea. [Don’t worry, David, I won’t shanghai you into signing this one as well!]

And it got me thinking.

I will know that something significant has happened when the reverse takes place. When I see books published on blogs and wikis and chat and social networks, explicitly targeting the over 65s or something like that.

Or should I make that the over 25s? :-)

Take a look at this video on YouTube, of a four-year-old playing drums. [Thanks to David Peskowitz at Boing Boing for the heads-up].

If you feel like it, search for four-year-old+drumming on YouTube, and see how many different hits you get.

Many people may use things like this to propagate a “nature wins” argument. I’m doing the opposite.

Everyone needs role models. Even four-year-olds. Especially four-year-olds. They need to see the Art of the Possible.

Until things like YouTube came along, the search and transmission costs for these disaggregated role models was too high. But now we have liftoff.

Just a thought.

I haven’t really thought this through, but then why blog about certainties? That’s how you get dogmatic.
My first thoughts about this date back to Google Maps and Google Earth. All I was doing then was luxuriating in the sheer power of the visualisation tools, and beginning to think that I wanted something similar for enterprise architecture.

This wasn’t some massive theoretical exercise for enterprise architectures in general. I wanted to use tools like those stated above very specifically. Use them to visualise (and make visual for others) the systems and applications architecture for a specific enterprise.

Over the last year or so, these thoughts have grown wild and sprouted all over the place. I liked what I saw in people tagging things on Google Earth. I became fascinated with what was happening in Second Life, and in virtual worlds in general.

Always believing that virtual worlds were about learning, about teaching, about applying what was learnt. About finding better ways of doing things.
I began to see the entire applications and infrastructure landscape for a given enterprise as a location on Second Life.  I began to see similar locations for competitors and for collaborators, for the market participants and the supply chain partners. Then I saw locations for those things that were truly commoditised, so commoditised that they could be represented as (guess what?) common land on Second Life. Common land with no fencing, no barriers, nothing in the way.

• [An aside. I just love the etymology of “by hook or by crook”. The phrase does not really translate to “by fair means or foul”, it should be rendered as “by legal means only”. The origin of the phrase relates to access to firewood on common land. You could legitimately chop down (for firewood) any branches of a tree (on common land) which you could pull down using a shepherd’s hook or crook.]

Where was I? Oh yes, Second Life and its use in enterprises, to visualise, monitor, manage, repair and sustain the enterprise applications landscape.

I was still missing something, something that needed to look like an Instant Messaging “channel” within the enterprise, where people could discuss applications issues, and from where they could, if needed, “teleport” themselves to the application in question.

So you can imagine how I felt when I saw this. BlogHUD. Take a look, see what you think. And let me know. Ideas are for free where I come from. If you want to do something about it, go ahead. Just let me know someday.
In the meantime I shall continue dreaming.

….Forum, that is. Not any more.
Esther confirms what the market has been whispering.

I hadn’t been able too make that many PC Forums, despite having booked for quite a few. It wasn’t just a conference, it was a rite of passage for the industry. So farewell PC Forum; and a big thank you from me to Esther and the team.

Some of you may have seen Chris Messina’s recent post about conferences and gender diversity; others may have followed the hullabaloo about Office 2.0 in a similar context. Now I don’t believe that it was ever done from a viewpoint of political correctness or anything as orchestrated as that, but it’s worth taking a look at the speaker lists at past PC Forums. I think it’s a worthwhile soft indicator as to how things changed over the years, in terms of real diversity in all kinds of things: age, culture, gender, discipline, perspective, you-name-it.

One thing I will be doing next year is attending Flight School, especially now that I know the dates (June 21 and 22). I’ve been lucky enough to make the first two. Why? I don’t know how to fly. I don’t make enough money to rent a plane, much less buy one. In fact I don’t even know how to drive. So why would I go to Flight School?

Simple. Passenger aviation shares a number of characteristics with other markets, characteristics that make it a very interesting petri dish:

• A fundamentally bankrupt business model
• A model architected on hub and spoke rather than distributed
• An oligopolistic market
• The potential for significant impact on environmental issues
• Regulatory overflows and conflicts all over the place
• State interventions and protections all over the place
• Pretend-competition as a result
• Outdated concepts of information technology and its value
• Tired and frustrated customers held to ransom

The list is the same for many other industry segments or markets. Financial services. Telecommunications. Healthcare. Aspects of welfare and education. Even government.

But there is hope, as we learn more about P2P models, more effective forms of communications, more affordable infrastructures, safer ways of doing things, better ways of doing things.

There is hope, as we find that this time around, everyone is involved. Almost everyone. As with any other market the elephant that isn’t in the room is the incumbent.

There is hope, as we find that this time around, issues are global, as are their solutions.

So I will be at Flight School. To learn about many markets.

Records of customer “past” behaviour appear to hold some value. If this was not the case, why would anyone spend money “mining” the information?

Records of future customer intention appear to hold some value. If this was not the case, why would anyone spend money on “market research”?

Identity is for sure a personal thing. If this was not the case, why would we speak of identity theft?

Privacy and confidentiality are very deeply rooted in trust. Trust that is conferred, sometimes tacitly, sometimes explicitly, by the individual. Who has a personal identity.
Modern web applications create value out of customer information. Granted, some of the value comes from the aggregation. Some of the value comes from the connections. But some of the value still comes from individual customer history and preferences and intentions and activity.
So.

How long before this value gets converted into a price? How long before this value can be traded? How long before individuals trade their information?
David Bowie only sold his back catalogue.

Maybe one day Generation M will be trading their back- and front- catalogues.

As we look deeper into identity and privacy and confidentiality and value creation from customer behaviour (both past and present) we may need to think about this as well.

Sometimes “Follow the money” is a good way to find solutions to difficult problems.

Just a thought.