Modus Cooperandi

Convergence and Procreation

Over the last several months, there have been several concepts floating around that I'd like to tie together this morning.  In the end, they all reveal something important: People's expectations in relationships are fundamentally changing.  This is probably evolutionary but is being triggered now by how our relationship to people, ideas, and things are now more controllable.

On-demand television means we watch whatever, whenever.  Videos, the same.  E-commerce means we can buy what we want, when we want, for a good price, get comparisons with like goods, discuss it with other users, etc.  All of this to the extent that we want to.  We don't have to do any of this, but there is the option.

The Unconference is a great example of our new relationship.  Google it.  Unconferences have grown out of people's growing lack of satisfaction for being talked to.  The egalitarianism of the Internet has led many to expect that they will be in on the conversation - not a recipient of unchallenged wisdom.

For years people have said that the value of any conference is the mixers and not the seminars.  That's because we learn more from our peers than we do from experts, surely.  But more importantly, it's because we care more about things we actively engage in.  We retain more when we are active.  We get more when we give.

The Great False Equalizer

Lisa Vaas reports in e-week that while Friendster has proven the previously thought impossible - you can not make money from sex - they are still desperately in search of a business model.  Now Friendster wants to inflict their networking software on businesses.   This vague and upexpounded upon statement indicates one thing, they don't want to tackle the real problem with social networking software.

Social networks are about networking.  Yet most, if not all, are hyperegalitarian.  Treating all links as Equal. If I know 40 people and have them in my friends lists, the world sees them as all of equal importance to me.

So if I put my wife and a guy I met at a conference in my list, the world sees those as of equal weight.

But I really like my wife!

Some try to give people weight by allowing users to say something really nice about other users.  These testimonials conceptually show that people are really really liked.  But as Sally Struthers will attest, someone really liking you in a specific context doesn't count for much in the long run.

Testimonials are, at best, a band-aid and at worst lip-service to the need for some sort of contact weighting technology.   I, personally, don't have a ready solution to this, but I do have some thoughts of what the solution would be built on.

Context

Under what circumstances would you recommend this person for something.  I might know a plumber who is horrendous at finish work but the absolute best at roughing-in.  In a conversation this would come out, but in a social networking program they appear as "plumber".  This is of utmost importance when companies are looking for ultra-specialized help.

Depth

Have you known this person for 8 minutes, are you link-swapping, did you go to college with them, are you sleeping with them?  Many people in my LinkedIn list are largely unknown to me.  They are still valid contacts, but they are not deep contacts.

Reputation

What is their reputation like overall?  Why does your opinion of them differ from the crowd?  Can you explain some of misperceptions others may have of them?

Collaboration

In what ways have you directly worked with this person?  How has that had an impact on your opinion of them?

These may just seem like detail, but the social networking system providers have a tough job here.  I don't want to link to anyone if it's going to take me an hour to do so.  And I don't really feel like writing up socio-psychohistories of everyone I come into contact with.

So the providers will have to devise proxies.  The proxy needs to obviously serve as such and be rapid to define.  And that's hard.  However, though it may be difficult, it is essential if social networking will be anything beyond a shared rolodex or a quick-sex portal for teenagers.

Cooperative Innovation

Google is an infrastructure provider on the infobahn.  Googlemaps, their most recent major freeway, is becoming instantly filling with travelers. 

This new infrastructure has allowed innovation smartmobbing by providing a flexible framework for coders to make widely available applications based on simple data overlays.  There's hundreds of them now.  People mapping everything from speed cameras to buses to cheap gas to personal wifi access to traffic to the best place to be trampled by a bull.

Since most things happen someplace, you can map it.  If you have a lot of things that happen in a lot of places, you can map them.  Then patterns emerge.  People like patterns.

Geographic Information Systems have been around since the 1960s.  As desktop computing has become more powerful, so has GIS.  Web based GIS has basically come in two major flavor's ESRI's ArcIMS (which our San Francisco site uses) and the University of Minnesota's Open Source MapServer.  ArcIMS is highly cost prohibitive for innovators, with a minimum out of pocket cost of $10,000.  MapServer, until recently, wasn't ready to handle the data challenges like the ESRI products.

But even if you chose either of these options, you still have to find data.  That's GoogleMaps biggest contribution.  You don't have to think about the maps, just the data and how to display it.  Maps are expensive to obtain and maintain.  The world is a dynamic place that changes all the time.

This has created an environment where much of the "hows" of a GIS application are taken care of and innovators can focus on the "whats".  This has led to a creative, distributed and uncoordinated burst of innovation and invention.

But this is innovation and invention using the grace of Google as a platform.  Certain questions arise:

1. How many maps can google serve for free?
2. What happens when killer apps rely on free services for mission critical applications?
3. How responsible for map veracity will Google be perceived to be - this is different from what their EULA might say<>
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   Is this ride contingent on high Google stock prices and oblique income streams?

Like the rest of us, I'm enjoying the ride.  Watching the world get swept up in mapping things.  We'll see where this goes.

Hail the Sharing Economy

David Kirkpatrick reports on sharing economies in Fortune magazine.  In this article he describes how the global economy is changing as communication between producers and customers grow.  Customers actually help the producers by providing advice, describing how they use the product, and sometimes even providing code or other direct elements of production.

The surprise here for producers is that people will actually lend their personal time to make the producer's product better.  This cooperation was previously unimagined.  In the past, to get feedback, producers had to invite people to cramped conference rooms and bribe them with small amounts of money.  What they generally get from these focus groups is a room full of people that participate in focus groups and not a true picture of their client base.

In the past, if I bought a Ford and I hated the rear view mirror, I might go out and buy another mirror and replace it.  I wouldn't tell Ford.  They wouldn't know.  Their mirrors would always be substandard.  Maybe a focus group would catch that, but maybe not.  Maybe it wasn't something you'd notice until you were blinded in the middle of a night while ascending a hill.

So now producers have a direct line (or a more direct line) to their customer base.  The customer base doesn't want to build whole software packages.  They don't want to make cars.  They don't want to produce product.  But they do want the things they buy to be better.  They are willing to talk about it and even help design new versions.

This is a double-edged sword.  Consumers are becoming more and more used to this as SOP.  With that, they expect faster results in product development.  So before Ford could have a new model come out and run with that model for 5 years or so.  Now they need to update the design every year to take into account the new information stream.  If they don't, consumers will quickly abandon them as non-responsive.

This begins to make manufacturers more like a service business.  Upgrade or Perish becomes a new business paradigm.  Underlying this is that upgrades need to be conspicuous.  Features are judged with near-beauty pageant fervor.  You want something that is going to create a stir outside your user base and delight current users as well.

Current users want the system improved but not radically altered.  That lets them continue with what they are doing and to take advantage of new features.  The general public, however, is looking for something surprising.  System improvements are rarely surprising.

Also like a service business, companies are moving increasingly toward fee-for-service or subscription models.  Even auto leases can be seen as an automobile subscription.  As this happens, cash flow paradigms, income projection mechanisms, and the relationship between company and consumer (current and potential) all change.

The sharing economy could well be the real fundamental business shift everyone was looking for in the 1990s.  The Internet was the fancy box, the sharing economy was the real gift.

But Blind People Don't Drive!!

When we took on the work to create the real-time traffic site for the San Francisco Bay Area we were asked to make the site as section 508 compliant as possible.  Rather than asking ourselves, "What is the letter of the law for Section 508?"  We chose to ask "What does accessibility mean?"

We met with the Elderly and Disabled advisory committee for the project and worked closely with the dynamic and boisterous Erika Webb from Quintus Design.  Our goal was to create a site that was not just accessible - but useful - to people with disabilities.

The challenge where was the real-time traffic map.  The literature at the time said it was not possible to make a dynamic geographic-information-systems based site that was accessible. We put a lot of time and thought into it and, in the end, created a real-time map with a variety of color palettes as well as a text-based mirror site that included all the information of the map, but in a format that a screen reader would have rapid access to specific information.

While we were working these out, some exasperated team members objected, "But blind people don't drive!"  After all, the whole point was to tell people where to drive, right?

Wrong.

A real-time traffic site should never tell people where to drive.  That's not the point.  The point is to tell them when it's good to go and what routes to avoid.  To time shift their trip.  To change mode.  To not clog the roadway.

Now, consider the trip of someone who is visually impaired.  Their trip needs to be scheduled in a way most of us would consider unacceptable.  First they schedule their ride.  Either by a caregiver, a private service, a taxi, paratransit or transit.    With the exception of transit, that vehicle then needs to come get them.  Then the go someplace - usually paying some amount of cash per trip. Now, imagine you are in the Bay Area where things are often a cross-region hike.  Your cab first has to get to you.  If traffic is bad, you may have already had to wait for that longer than anticipated.  Now, the moment you get in the cab, you are charged for time.  If you get out onto 880 and sit ... that costs you real money, real fast.  At the same time, it annoys the cab driver because they cannot get out and get other fares.

So blind people have a greater need for this detailed information than perhaps anyone else. Since we launched the site, we've received several kudos for the accessibility, the best worded came the other day:

Just wanted to commend you guys on including a colorblind-friendly option for  the traffic congestion maps.  I had been looking at the map with the regular  color scheme, lamenting the fact that it's almost useless for a red/green  colorblind person, when I checked out the other color options. This is the  first time I've seen us colorblind folks accommodated anywhere! It's much  appreciated. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Eugene Gogerman,  Esq.

Note the key word "anywhere".  The solutions to these issues were conceptually easy to implement.  The exact color palettes to a while to work out.  But the problems were still minimum compared to the cost of closing out a large segment of people from having access to information generated with their tax dollars.

Potential Pervasive Populist Panopticon?

It all came to a head in the London Tube.

David Brin's Earth (fiction) and The Transparent Society (theory) examined the impacts of varying degrees of transparency in society.  The concept here is that if government can have implements to view deeply into our private lives, the citizenry should have the same views into the operations of government.  The extension is that we also have that view into the lives of each other.

Howard Rheingold's book Smart Mobs sees this as a popular revolt enabled by emergent technology.  Cell phones, digital cameras and pervasive networks (both social and technological) can rapidly transmit organizing messages to the masses.

Larry Lessig's book Code describes the evolution of copyright, intellectual property. and information control in western culture.  It goes on to describe how these notions of the permanence of intellectual property were necessary, but are becoming increasingly less so.  Thoughts like this have become the bedrock of the open source movement and the Creative Commons.

Also, in this mix, is Duncan Watts expands a bit on a topic from his book Six Degrees in this article from Slate a while back.  Here Duncan discusses how superior intelligence can be gathered from diversified sources rather than overly-centralized sources.   This theme is also discussed in detail in The Wisdom of Crowds and a whole lot of other books at the moment.

So ... as I said, it all came to a head in the London Tube.

People entered the tube on a normal workday to do normal things.  They were living as Londoners, as tourists, each playing their part in a normal London day.  Then the extraordinary happened.  At that moment, their relationships changed.  Reordered.  Mutated.

They added to this list:  Terrorism Impactees.  Some were injured, some were killed, some heroically pulled others from cars, some fled in a panic of self-preservation.  But they all shared that. 

Many of them, armed only with their Nokias, started taking pictures, taking video, documenting.  I blogged about this recently in a different context , the context of the ownership of one's life.

Over the last several weeks, there has been a mild but discernible backlash against the people who took these pictures.  Against news agencies that paid for pictures or video from amateurs.  Against the concept of taking a picture in a moment of emergency.

Building the 4,000 Legged Monster

Monsters are not always bad.  In Japanese sequels they're often the protector of little children. 

Robert May wants to build a 4,000 legged business monster on-line.  The site will provide a somewhat MMI (Massive Muliplayer Incubator) for a new business.

Participants join, toss in some ideas, the group discusses the ideas, votes and a business pops out.  Particpants are equity stakeholders in the new business.  I wanted to blog the site's existence now.  I'm going to go take a look its operations and report back.

Chasing the Tail

Today Roland Piquepaille started his SmartMob's blog entry discussing the Long Tail Concept.  He included a quote which I will now appropriate:

"The 20th Century mass production world was about dozens of markets of millions of people. The 21st Century is all about millions of markets of dozens of people," -- Joe Kraus - currently of Jotspot

Simultaneously we were discussing Long Tail both as a mathematical and as a concept with impacts on the recording industry on the Pho List.

Here was my two cents in that discussion. 

The long tail phenomenon is just starting to be realized as business (including the recording industry) sees parts of their catalog suddenly see movement after long periods of stagnation.

For example, last year for my Father's birthday, I picked him up 24 Bob and Ray CDs.  This has got to be the hallmark of long taildom.  Bob and Ray fans are numerous, but certainly not concentrated.  There is no way a traditional store with a walk-in client base could have ever supported a collection of 24 Bob and Ray CDs.

But this little Internet boutique sells more than enough of them to be worth their while.

Hand in hand with this is downloading.  Yes, I bought Bob and Ray CDs for my dad.  But in order to do so, I had to know who they were in the first place.  With broadcast media being limited to television (arguably MTV and VH1) and radio (arguably being Clear Channel), the ability of the population to sample non-hyped entertainment without buying a peek-in-a-poke is minimal.

Downloading then becomes the new broadcast medium.  Podcasts, file sharing and Internet radio allow people to sample wide ranges of content with little or no personal fiscal penalty.  Blanket DRM measures would surely squander this resource.

Long tail commerce cannot be exploited or enjoyed without some degree of buyer-side penalty free publicity like file sharing or podcasting.

As the long tail income stream is more recognized by "Big Content" perhaps we will see a shifting of priorities.

--

Beyond this post though comes other convergent Internet themes.  Trusted networks could play a big role in this.  We have explored trusted networks for business and dating relationships.  Some peer-to-peer networks include various forms of trusted networking as well.

For example, in Shareaza users can flag files that were of poor quality, contained viruses or contained content other-than-advertised.  They can also rate up various files.

All of this, however, is anonymous.  And this is due to the uncertainties in the legality of downloading content.  Imagine, however, if users did not have to worry about potential nuisance law suits from the RIAA and could focus on the content.   People you trusted could specifically recommend specific items and you could trial them.

Would this downloading hurt the artists?  Not necessarily, Brian Eno was recently able to re-release several albums of his from the early 70s simply because the download popularity of them was so high.  It certainly wasn't because he was on Screaming FM107's heavy rotation.

The long tail, and the concept that markets don't need to be concentrated to be large, will provide more choices, more opportunities and more avenues for expression than ever before.  Current Content houses are dogs.  They're gonna get wagged.

The Wrong Technology Part II

It's been blogged to death and I hestitated writing at all as I feel a little late for the party, but I wanted to get down my thoughts on the Los Angeles Times Wikitorial debacle.  I recently wrote a piece about a journalist who intereviewed Ross Mayfield over IM and then cut and pasted his interview and called that an article.  My point in that article was that IM is a great means of communication, but a lousy means of getting detailed or poignant interview responses.

Similarly, the wiki was ill-suited for the role that the LA Times gave it.  Many others have noted that when you have a combative environment of opinions, an open forum can't become anything better than a constant delete-and-revise fest.

Likewise in my post about NewsConduits, the LA Times didn't understand how they were to interact with the new technology.  They thought that people would come to the wiki and talk about the LA Times, their writers, and how they interpreted the news that they read there.  This is likely because newspapers rarely have open dialogues with their readers and, therefore, have no real understanding of how their readers actually use the news they are providing.

Newspapers, of anyone, should understand that the news is inherently interpretive and contentious.  They should absolutely try to provide innovative systems to foster discussion about current events.  They should be prepared for hot tempers and design a system to avoid that.  The wide-open format of the Wiki was ill suited to stop ill behavior.

Several news sources implicate Slashdot as the impetus for the bad behavior.  I think this is rather unfair.  All on-line forums are prone to at-least occaisional flare-ups.  They are, after all, populated by people.  This system was inherently unstable.

The best on-line systems are well focused and well monitored, with penalties for misbehavior.  The LA Times system had no penalties other than dismissal.  And dismissal was easily thwarted.  Combine that with a lack of focus and you get a short lived experiment.

Having said this, I greatly commend the LA Times for going for it.  While many of us would have designed a different system, even in its ashes we all have learned something and have a scenario to point to in the future.  I invite people to stop beating on the LA Times and to thank them.  They can learn from this, we can learn from this.  It's all good.

... Just so long as they don't start copying and pasting their chat logs into the paper.

Now is the time for all good to come to the of the Party

MSN Spaces, a blogging and social tool from the Microsoft Corportation has opened service in China.  The predecessor of MSN China was MSN Asia which stumbled mightily with amusing or tragic cultural missteps.  With the launch of MSN China, MSN Spaces makes the first steps of cultural sensitivity by banning words like "freedom" and "democracy" from entries on its blogs.  Amusingly, here's a story from MSN about it.