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I joined the RSS Advisory Board with Meg Hourihan, Loïc Le Meur, Eric Lunt, Rogers Cadenhead, Jenny Levine, Randy Charles Morin, Greg Reinacker and Dave Sifry. Now, I'm an Atom fan and can't say that the previous board accomplished anything. But RSS is a critical standard for our industry and I hope to bring a perspective as a toolbuilder for the enterprise.
First order of business, draft 1 of a new RSS specification.
Good to be back in Helsinki. It's about freezing and the sun set around 4pm, which isn't so bad considering it was minus twenty celcius a couple of weeks ago. My wife couldn't make the trip, so no side trip to Tallinn this time. Tomorrow I'm speaking at the Nokia Research Center, Tuesday there is an open event at the auditorium at Sanomatalo.
The one thing that is infuriating is my hotel has pre-paid wifi. Every hour I get cut off and have to register from scratch to give them eight euros.
Google's decision to filter search results on behalf of the Chinese government was certainly not an easy one. I had hoped that Google would be different, a citizen of the net. But corporations are not citizens, not even of their home country.
Corporations gained legal status as individuals under the precedent set by the Thirteenth Amendment which abolished slavery. Bizarrely, the logic was if slaves are 5/5ths of a person, instead of 3/5ths, then so too should be a corporation. They gained legal rights as individuals, but not the responsibility of citizens with obligations to society. All they do is pay taxes, mostly. Their obligation is to their shareholders and the profit motive.
Today corporations are multinational, and the incorporated form as individual is inherited throughout the world. If there was such a thing as international law, corporations would transcend it. The social responsibility of a corporation defaults to the lowest common denominator across jurisdictions. A corporation may take advantage of lower environmental regulations in one country and child labor in another, while receiving the benefits of incorporation in tax sheltering countries. Financial and political risk is evenly distributed.
There is no societal obligation for the corporate form, however, long term profit motive rewards the socially responsible corporation. This raises interesting questions in the case of Google's China market entry strategy.
If you read the tea leaves, you will see conscious succumbed to at least the short term profit motive.
Filtering our search results clearly compromises our mission. Failing to offer Google search at all to a fifth of the world's population, however, does so far more severely. Whether our critics agree with our decision or not, due to the severe quality problems faced by users trying to access Google.com from within China, this is precisely the choice we believe we faced. By launching Google.cn and making a major ongoing investment in people and infrastructure within China, we intend to change that.
But John Battelle is probably right:
I think they convinced themselves it was the right thing to do. They thought themselves into it. And deep down, they aren't sure they did the right thing. At least, that's what I want to believe. Sure, Microsoft is going to go in. Yahoo and IBM are going to go in. But Google? We thought...well, we thought you were different.
As multinational information services corporations enter China under China's rules the undoubtedly gain in short term profit. They all do so, however, with the promise of accessing what will be the largest market in the world. Playing by the rules respects the sovereignty of China, which in some ways should be acknowledged, as many a corporate abuse stems from a multinational being prescriptive in policy. And, in fact, one of the greater fears societies hold for multinationals is their ability to not only transcend, but make policy.
But this is the network age, where even the physics of information are different. I've had a chance to meet blog service providers and gain an understanding of the operational model of censorship. Most critically, users transcend the filter, creating their own language to gain freedom of speech. Which raises a very interesting scenario: Google.cn is launched, users as publishers and searchers optimize search for freedom, the filter is calibrated, users calibrate, rinse, lather and repeat. Two potential outcomes: (1) the transaction costs imposed in search for this model become so great that Google exits, or (2) China gets to hold a party line and the volume of business to Google out-weight the impact on margin. It's probably number two.
I'm not sure I buy the argument that not playing by China's rule capitulates the market to others. Congressmen are calling for hearings on why American companies are playing by these rules. Reporters Without Borders launched an online campaign for US firms to refrain from hosting email servers, filtering search engines, hosting blogs and discussion forums in repressive countries. Still, some will undoubtedly play by the rules, but users will route around the wall. Enough, at least, to make a market until change in China happens.
China is growing, but it's growth and structure is unsustainable. Growth is in the cities and benefiting a minority, with unprecedented negative externalities such as pollution. Meanwhile, the bulk of the country remains rural and poor. The potential to leapfrog into the network age is being realized despite censorship for some. Censorship in the network era ultimately fails because there is no such thing as control. It does work for a subset of less savvy users. The very same users and potential users that are being left behind in economic growth. "What is the fear?" said a Chinese censorship official at Davos. "We are afraid about the disorder of the society." He should be more afraid of the economic and societal disorder that happens with unsustainable growth. This is the one digital divide that is potentially revolutionary, bread riots over bandwidth.
China fears Google. With Market-Leninism, the greatest succession of control is to multinationals, especially those in the information business. But Google's fear of China is irrational because market access is granted when the physical network is in place. China thinks with a longer time horizon than any other country, Google could too. Initially serving the very influential Chinese diaspora and circumventing users, while waiting for a larger change -- may prove more profitable.
My hope is that Google is the first to yield to US political pressure, plays by rules more consistent with their mission than corporate convention, justifies the action to it's shareholders as long-term profit motive and provides a model for corporate citizenship to others.
Oh, the horror. Drunk from berry juice, the Davos contingent circumbs to crackberry. Potentially forced to go cold turkey over a patent dispute, apparently the switching costs are too high to conceieve of fix.
"It's just nuts. The idea that someone is just going to switch it off in three or four weeks, even if it's only in the United States, is crazy," Peter Levene, chairman of the Lloyd's of London insurance market, told Reuters.
"Everybody has adapted their working habits to it. If you close it off at a stroke the damage could be colossal."
Before they settle on innovation being a patent game, they come to their profit motive senses.
"There is too much money at stake. At some point, somebody will blink and work out a compromise," David Rubenstein, founder of private equity firm The Carlyle Group, told Reuters.
"If not, there will be plenty of competitors to BlackBerry to fill the lacuna."
Perhaps there is settlement to be found.
Closed has everything to do with intellectual property and it's access. Lets we forget the Legal Tail, where the hits keep coming enough to the disputes with the greatest transaction costs. Costs best borne by a commons interest, but those structures are only on their way.
The Socialtext team has rounded out very nicely, with the major exception of a really great visual design lead. We are looking for someone that loves to design clean, beautiful and usable web apps. Working out of our Palo Alto offices would be a plus, but we'd talk to anybody really good even if they weren't local.
If you wanted to hire someone who would do spectacular visual design for your web app, who would you hire?
Heading to Helsinki tomorrow to give a talk on the future at Nokia. It will be damn cold.
I'm coming back through London to visit some customers. Looking forward to seeing some of you there at WikI Wednesday. We haven't picked a location yet, so sign up to help us with headcount.
Alex Soojung-Kim and David Pescovitz's article in Wired on Cyberspace is Dead now has a blog:
Cyberspace is a "metaphor we live by," born two decades ago at the intersection of computers, networks, ideas, and experience. It has reflected our experiences with information technology, and also shaped the way we think about new technologies and the challenges they present. It had been a vivid and useful metaphor for decades; but in a rapidly-emerging world of mobile, always-on information devices (and eventually cybernetic implants, prosthetics, and swarm intelligence), the rules that define the relationship between information, places, and daily life are going to be rewritten. As the Internet becomes more pervasive-- as it moves off desktops and screen and becomes embedded in things, spaces, and minds-- cyberspace will disappear.
I like Steve Jurvetson's suggested neologism from the article: Augmented reality. In competition with virtual worlds and AIs, we will coevolve and internalize technologies to augment reality and our intelligence.
The blog shares some that didn't make the cut, like mine, related to the web of verbs: On. When kids use the Net, they are either On, using it as a conduit for social interaction, or Off, a way of not being present. We need to retain Off as a right.
I've been on a bit of a blog vacation and it's time to get back to um, work. Three factors have me holding back: Internal Blogging, WoW and a disconnect from reading blogs.
I find myself blogging internally more than here. Socialtext is over 20 people these days, with most people working from home. We got through the natural scaling point that kicks in around 12 people and the co-location of some of us in one office by making communication an even greater priority. Today most people blog daily, all with their own style. Some use it as an open to-do (and done) list, some wax poetic, others interpret the outside world. But generally I find myself, as a managing reader, with less of a need to ask for status or drive conversation. I always thought I would thank internal blogging for making me and my team effective as it has for our customers, it's just great when it happens. Call it drinking you own champagne.
I've leveled my Paladin (Kalevipoeg) on Word of Warcraft to 45. Like Joi (Jonkichi) and Don (Slashdar), the purpose of playing is research. You can learn a lot about social behavior, coordination and group forming from WoW (think geeks learning team sports). You can forge good relationships (think the new golf) upon shared experiences. You can consider design constructs that make WoW so rich and addictive (cough, research). But I still wonder if it is social software. Unlike other tools, it doesn't provide incentives for me to leave a richer life. With blogging, for example, if I'm not living I have less to share. Because the object (as in object-centered sociality) is so rich, multi-faceted and bound within a given world -- the stories you spin off of it are more about the object than something in the real world itself. One property Clay observed that made social software different was how it augmented the real world. You see it clearly in Meetup, Plazes, Moblogging, etc. I'd expect future generations of WoW and other gaming may trend towards augmenting or incenting a better Real Life.
Of all things, Memeorandum has given me an excuse to read less. I think I've tricked myself into thinking that a quick scan is good enough, but all I'm getting is the group think dosage. Wait, it's worse than that. I'm getting the group think usage as gamed. This isn't a specific digg at Memeorandum, any prime and open real-estate gets gamed. But just wait for the Chinese Link Farmers.
When editing my own Wikipedia entry got me smeared in the pages of The Register, the irony was too delicious. Andrew Orlowski's account of my editing of my Wikipedia entry was founded on a factual error, and it appeared in an editorial about how Wikipedia is untrustworthy because Wikipedia contained just that sort of factual error.
What's easier: correcting a malicious Wikipedia entry about you or correcting a malicious news-story about you? In the past year, I've had the opportunity to do both, and for me, it's clear that if you're going to have your name dragged through the mud, it's a better deal if it comes at the hand of an anonymous Wikipedia troll than from a paid journalist in a mainstream news-source.
Parental advice from an Arctic explorer: The role of a father these days is to give his children something they can only get from their father.
Seconds before he described how he would rub the snot from his nose all over his face as protection from the cold.
It's all happening. MashupCamp is a loosely joined open space event for mashing APIs and open source. Socialtext set up a Kwiki for the event, which will be at least one day between February 18th-25th around Palo Alto. Co-organizers David Berlind and Doug Gold are nailing down the location, but signups for a maximum of 250 developers and observers are open.
Using my supreme design skills, I whipped up a logo:
Which sucked, so Pete Kaminski made one:
Which is a trip. And Chris Radcliffe made one too:
Now the logos are in rotation on the wiki. You too can contribute one (expect modest fame, possibly T-shirts, no fortune), and people are voting on this wiki page.
Oh, and huge hat tips to FooCamp, BarCamp, Ward Cunningham, Kwiki and the Open Space Method.
If you liked EPIC 2014, the Googlezon film, and have dreams of perfect liquidity, you will love Sean Park's AmazonBay 2015 -- a future film on Financial Services disrupted by the net. From his making of post:
My premise is as follows: the basic structure and ecosystem of the financial services industry has remained relatively unperturbed by the internet revolution...
My point is that while there have been very important and very real improvements in productivity in financial services due to this investment in ICT, the underlying business models have changed very little - if at all - and there has been no ‘disruptive’ newcomers to the party. This is not completely surprising as the barriers to entry in financial services are very high: highly regulated, powerful (financially and politically) incumbents, extremely high customer inertia and a natural embedded conservatism given that we are dealing with people’s money. So if I am an eBay or an Amazon or Google or the next great WebCo, it is natural that I aim my innovation at softer targets like media or retailing (or even sports betting!) first. Main Street before Wall Street.
But while this entry barrier is very high, one day it too will be breached. It may be a few years away or more, but I believe it is ultimately inevitable.
Although speculative, Sean would know, he happens to run Digital Markets, and previously ran the Credit Business at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. One fascinating aspect of this scenario is the rise of sports betting as a dominant asset class.
Dan Mitchell's What's Online column in the NY Times highlights the grey area of the Business Blogging Wiki:
For instance, Mr. Baker notes that Jason Calacanis' blog, which focuses on technology, blogging and media in general, as well as personal stuff, is counted on the wiki as a Time Warner blog. (Mr. Calacanis created Weblogs Inc., which was bought by Time Warner.) But, Mr. Baker says, Mr. Calacanis "writes about his niche - not much about Dick Parsons or the layoffs at Time magazine."
Still, the nature of a wiki, which can be edited or updated by any user, is to allow such problems to be ironed out over time...
But Steve Baker also noted:
Imagine if someone tried to write a McGraw-Hill blog, covering the textbook business, magazines, trades, and financial ratings and info services. It would be a mess.
Probably would, given recent turmoil. Instead, as is common with corporate blogging, you have to get bits an pieces of the story from many and many kinds of blogs.
So far, the BB500 has supported a binary research question, are they in, or out. I'd like to explore other facets of the Spectrum of Corporate Social Media:
Ranked from Lowest Risk (and Conversation)
I've put the above list in a wiki page. After flushing it out, we can use tags in Socialtext for faceted classification of corporate blogging and wiki use.
UPDATE: Line56's editor notes:
The reason blog tracking becomes particularly important in the business context is that a large company can have tens of thousands of employees (and perspectives). The blog isn't a monolithic form of corporate communication; two bloggers at the same company can offer radically different kinds of information in different styles and formats.
Shel Israel talks about the disruption of his own business:
Way back when the blogosphere was young, in April 2004, I wrote a piece called: "Will blogging kill Conferenza?" As I recall it was the first time that two A-listers, Ross Mayfield and David Weinberger ever linked to me, which as I recall, made me ecstatic--except for the fact the posting questioned whether Conferenza Premium Reports, a high-quality newsletter of which I was and am editor in chief could survive a new wave of competition from an odd and unruly lot that called themselves "bloggers." Back then, Conferenza pretty well held the center of my passion even if it didn't pay very many bills That's just one way it resembles blogging for me.
Conferenza covers the top tier technology conferences every year such as PC Forum, Demo, Poptech, D, TED and so on. Increasingly at these events, I would find myself surrounded by this band of upstarts like Ross, David and Doc, who were showing up, sitting next to me and writing about the very same conferences. Except these bloggers were publishing even as speakers were winding up their talks. And these new competitors were giving--the content away.
Conversely, Conferenza usually published a week later, and we did a remarkable job in my biased opinion of telling the whole story of the conference in terms of what was said on the dais, what the audience thought of it and what the complications were. We went through pains to report on candid attendee views. We even linked to these upstart bloggers and quoted them. The Conferenza newsletters often went over 10,000 words and were designed for executives to read in an hour's time or so, there has always been something very conversational about Conferenza, something very bloglike.
I remember Shel and Gary acknowledging that conference bloggers were going to put Conferenza out of it's current form of business as far back as the first Always On event. It is a shame, however, as it served a needed niche and their long form of content was really well done. Will be interesting to see what new form evolves on their new blog (subscribed).
Beyond conference blogging, wikis are enabling all attendees to their own views. Socialtext has provided Eventspaces for almost 75 seminars, conferences and trade shows now and it's become a kind of industry standard. What's interesting is that it is not a product, but a service, and we are still the only team with a track record for wiki facilitation.
We're hiring a Senior Account Manager, based in either Palo Alto or NYC. It's a great opportunity to join a great team, with room to grow.
In their brilliant Blue Ocean Strategy, INSEAD authors Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne present their basic thesis in simple terms: "Value innovation is about making the competition irrelevant by creating uncontested market space. We argue that beating the competition within the confines of the existing industry is not the way to create profitable growth."
That's precisely what Mike Leach has done—and what you need to do is read every damn word in the article .... which may be the best article on business strategy I've ever read. Especially biz strategy for the 00s.
He is referring to an article by Michael Lewis (Moneyball) on Texas Tech's football coach that kept me up thinking half the night. Jim McGee says: Go read the article. For extra credit, go read what Peters has to say. Then put both of them down and think about it. Essentially, Mike Leach has changed the geometry, tempo and approach to talent of the game.
We'll be talking football and more tomorrow night at Wiki Wednesday in Palo Alto.
Wikipedia is based on a very radical idea, the realization of the dreams most of us have always had for what the Internet can and should become. Thousands of people, all over the world, from all cultures, working together in harmony to freely share clear, factual, unbiased information… a simple and pure desire to make the world a better place.
This is a radical strike at the heart of an increasingly shallow, proprietary and anti-intellectual culture. It is a radical strike at the assumption that the Internet has to be a place of hostile debate and flame wars. It is an appeal to the best within all of us.
Socialtext donated $2,000 to the Wikipedia fundraising campaign, which ends this week.
See Also: Why the media can't get Wikipedia right
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