I ought to have mentioned this a long time ago, but if your interested in the deep puzzle of identity in our Internet era you’ll be greatly rewarded by reading Kim Cameron’s Identity Weblog. It just marvelous. This is a very tough design problem and even f I don’t entirely agree with them all it helps to have very smart diverse minds working on it.
This article by Richard Bernstein A Continent Watching Anxiously Over the Melting Pot that appears in the New York Times is just awful.
It fails to provide any demographic data. For example it doesn’t mention the problem of an aging population or the low birth rate. It fails to mention any transportation and regulatory changes than make population mixing so much easier. For example it doesn’t mention the effect of the European Union of cross national migration within the union. It fails to mention any of the forces – war, famine, etc. – that drive populations to flee their homelands.
Finally it casts a entirely false picture of America as a paradise of multiculturalism. That is so bogus! I live in Massachusetts, I gather we are a liberal kind place. We recently passed a law by popular referendum and over the objections of all experts to outlaw public school funding of curriculum in the student’s native language.
A friend of mine and I have a game we play that involves attempting to enumerate the well known cliches about ‘them’; i.e. those people who live in next valley, the other department, the next town, etc. For example their women are aggressive, but exotic and passionate. Their women are oppressed and submissive; but it’s an act. You won’t believe what they do to their children. Eat their young! Let them run wild! They do, of course, live for the moment – they don’t know how to defer short term pleasure for a long term benefit; like we do. You’d be surprised at what they wear. Clueless! Oh man. It’s a weak culture, yes, but that leads to a brutish power that you must both respect and fear. Rhythm, they do have rhythm. …
This article is a useless cartoon even than that.
What a waste of news print, bring on the fishes.
Moments such as when Archduke Franz Ferdinand or John F. Kennedy got shot are oft considered so significant a fork in the road that people expend pages imagining alternate histories. I can’t help thinking that today we are at just such a moment. Consider this quote from the New York Times article that appeared as part of the PR campaign around Google’s plan to scan the collections of some of the major libraries.
“Within two decades, most of the world’s knowledge will be digitized and available, one hopes for free reading on the Internet, just as there is free reading in libraries today,” said Michael A. Keller, Stanford University’s head librarian.
Can you see what’s horribly wrong with that sentence?
The steward of one of the worlds richest repositories of human knowledge says “one hopes for free.” In effect he’s saying that no, the deal does not assure that.
I would love to be convinced that these librarians didn’t do what I think they did, but it looks to me like they just sold their collections to Google for cheap. It appears that they taken the public good that they, their predecessors, their donors, and their institutions, all of mankind have labored to create and assemble over the millennium and handed it over into private ownership.
I’m sure that the folks at Google are the nicest people, but that knowledge is mankind’s, and it shouldn’t be a matter of “hope” that it be available for free. If there is one lesson that open source has taught us it’s that it is surprisingly easy to capture a public good by the adding of the smallest bits of technology.
If my fears are well founded then this is a very black day in mankind’s history.
Scott Rosenberg’s posting on why corporation aren’t likely to embrace blogging is excellent, as far as it goes.
My first reaction to his posting was that it misdiagnosis the forces which undermine blogging in a corporate context. The sticks he shows people getting hit with are big sticks; fines, firings, etc. Yes that happens, but long before that happens much smaller sources of negative feedback come into play.
I was often bemused at how, when I worked for a large firm, my colleagues would project their circumstances into my blog postings. Sometimes that could get downright dangerous though. Particularly if they believed I was revealing some secret. Sometimes it was a secret I didn’t even know!
The human mind is amazingly willing to draw analogies between this and that.
One of Scott’s examples is a club fining a member for airing dirty laundry. One of the functions of a club is to create a bubble of privacy. That privacy allows the club to efficiently resolve problems without engaging the entire planet in the dispute resolution. Members that shift the venue of dispute resolution out of the club, into another domain, violate club loyalty and should expect to bear a cost when they do that. It’s romantic nonsense to pretend that isn’t the case.
Corporations are full of such bubbles. Managing them is the greatest puzzle of middle management. Superiors pay subordinates to solve problems; they don’t pay them to advertise or up level those problems. It’s very difficult for teams to find the right balance between keeping the problems inside the bubble where they can be worked on efficiently and revealing them more widely so they can find aid and help from others. That’s made doubly subtle due to the nested and overlapping of these bubbles. One striking example of that is corporate law. There are very strict rules about how news can be revealed if a company is publicly traded. There is always a strong undertow of competitive one-upmanship going on. Gossip and frivolous and/or cruel point scoring. It’s amazing information flows at all in large organizations.
Of course, we are traveling thru a very major shift in how we talk to each other.
Yeah, some of the reaction to blogging is just Luddite fear of new technology. I’ve certainly seen middle managers of that kind. They reaction to the idea of blogging as a scheme to displace them from their seat in control of the story. Spinning a yarn for peers and superiors. Such dudes are dinosaurs.
But behind that is something deeper and more fundamental, a shift in how the bubbles of private spaces are managed.
The talented middle manager runs a very complex communication membrane around his group. That talent was learned over years and years of practice – lots of little sticks and carrots. Most people don’t have these skills. People without these skills often assume the skills are evil. That’s a puzzle. Just as we are being forced to re-architect how that craft is performed a large number of folks dis those most expert in the craft.
The build out of corporate blogging will be slow. Two groups need to climb a steep learning curve. The organizations need to discover why this is a good thing. They will need to discover rules that allow them to manage it – paxis. But also the corp. bloggers will need to learn at least a gallon or two of the 55 gallon drum of knowledge a talented middle manager knows.
I had breakfast the other day with a friend who was involved in a group ware company for many years. He introduced the very amusing idea that a good platform strives to be like Seinfeld; about nothing. That’s got delightful synergy with both the idea that a platform vendor strives to create a huge space of options for his developers as well as the the idea that the long tail is impossible to describe.
Then the discussion turned to group ware. We got to talking about the corporate culture shaping power of software.
The first time I observed that was with bug databases. The arrival of a bug database into a project always has a startling effect. It creates a way of organizing the work, call it BD, and it often rapidly displaces other means of organizing the work, call them OM. BD wasn’t just the bug database; it was a entire culture of how to work. Little things happen, for example, dialogs about the issues emerge in the bug comments and if the tool supports it these dialogs become central to the work. Big things happen like the emergence of entire roles such as bug finder v.s. bug fixer. Anxiety managers quickly learned how to leverage the BD culture. It’s a machine who’s crank they can turn. On the one hand, this was all just great.
But BD had a strong tendency to displace other methods, or OM. OM always lacked a name. It wasn’t a single thing you could name; it’s not even a small integer of things. BD doesn’t cotton to redesign or analysis. BD fails at solving any issue above a certain size. BD had a strong tendency to glue problems to individuals. All these preferences and tendencies of BD are a good thing, except when they weren’t effective.
I can recall a occasions when I would get a large problem solved only by changing the person a bug or collection of bugs was assigned to into a team. Conversely there are situations where the right answer was to assign a bug to a nonexistent person – i.e. the person not yet hired or the person who understands this mystery but who didn’t know it yet.
What was unarguable about the BD culture was it’s efficiency and efficacy. Sadly, in the end it excluded the the other methods required to solve key problems. Looks like a nail cause i got a hammer thinking would begin to dominate. Product hard to use, open a bug. Product starts up too slow, open a bug. Customer learning curve too steep, open a bug.
The BD v.s. OM syndrome has a second kind of displacing syndrome. Individual contributors quickly realize that if they want to part of the work culture they need to get hooked up and pay attention to the evolving BD status. This creates a network effect that strengthens ties between the BD culture and the labor. Which is good for the BD culture; but it’s train wreck if hired a given person for his exceptional skill that happens to be a member of the set of other methods. For example you’ll observe the graphic designer wasting a few hours a day reviewing the bug database status and individual bug updates so he can be a clueful participant in the work flow – but since you didn’t hire him for that it becomes cost not efficient.
In chatting with my friend the example we got to talking about was group calendaring. We had both experienced a syndrome where the firms we were working in had installed a group calendaring tool and almost immediately the firm’s entire problem solving culture had been transformed. In this case a GC culture would displace OM.
In the GC culture it’s easier to schedule meetings so you get more meetings. The software has strong opinions about meeting granularity; so you get mostly one hour meetings. Meetings tend to be family sized. The software makes it easy to invite more people, so more people get invited. Meetings by their synchronous nature are exclusionary. Not wanting to appear exclusive with members of the extended family of coworkers people tend to invite additional people. People, concerned about what might happen behind the closed doors of those meetings tend to accept the invitations.
That feedback loop that tends to push meetings toward family sized is the GC culture equivalent of the graphic designer wasting his time reading all the dialogs on bugs. You get brilliant team members attending 3 hours of meetings a day because they happen to know that once or twice during those three hours they will say “Ah, I’m not sure that works.” I’ve seen corporate cultures where that’s considered a day’s work for a brilliant guy. “I’m so happy you came to the planning meeting! You really saved our butt.”
This is, of course, part of the problem of the long tail. The organizational culture that adopts one of these highly efficient methods, call that EM so that BD or GC above are examples of EM, develops a power-law among it’s members. Those members who adopt EM enthusiastically gain a place higher up the curve then those who stick to the core competency. They become the elite and all the usual polarizing forces come into play.
None of this requires the introduction of Machiavellian agendas by the players. People are just “atoms in a jar” as the forces play out: synchronization, efficiency, displacement, cultural network effects, and emergence of the elite and consequential polarization.
I don’t think it’s over generalizing to say that when ever you introduce an synchronizing device you gain some degree of measurable efficiency at the cost of displacing nameless uncountable other methods that don’t synchronize well with the method you’ve adopted. If you can’t name them then it’s going to be even harder to measure them. Why bother to even try if they are uncountable.
I added the authimage hack to my blog’s word press installation some time ago. It forces those who leave comments to pass a small test that they are human. It has been a complete success. Previously I was doing lots of hand work as well as maintaining lots of overly clever code.
Highly recommended!
Getting the customer to buy some additional stuff late in the transaction is called “up selling.” Candy in the checkout line at the grocery store. Extended warranties at the electronics’ store. Rust proofing at the car dealer. These are high margin sales. Some vendors probably make most of their income on the upsell.
So my wife was amused when the term “upsell” appeared in the title bar at eBay’s half.com.
I’m proud to see that she started from somebody’s Amazon wish list and ending up at a much lower cost vendor.
Here’s a fine critique of a common kind of delusion that arises when people think about the nature of the long tail. This is the intro to a New Yorker music review.
“World music” is a category that does nobody any favors. Entirely disparate performers, liek the dapper Brazilian singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso and the African blues guitarist Ali Farka Toure, get lumped together in American record stores simply because they don’t sing exclusively in English. Also, European and American pop have saturated the world to such an extent that Kyle Minogue and Tupac are now more world music than, say the Malian singer Oumou Sangare. Finally, most of what you find in the world-music section tends toward the gentle, melodious, and uplifting, as if the world were that way.
World music is the long tail. The process renders that long tail as melodious and uplifting? Romanticization.
Very hard to generalize about the long tail. It’s only attributes are: huge scale, exceptional diversity, and poverty. Well “poverty” if your measuring stick marked off in units that are useful for measuring the wealth of the elite. That marking stick, useful for the elite, is useless down in the long tail.
Melodious – it reminds me of the way that people who run developer networks like to say that developers “just want to have fun.”
I may have let the Oyster Mushrooms ripen just a bit too much before harvesting them last night. You ought to pick them before they start to turn up along the edges and I notice in this picture they are almost there.
My son said they tasting like a nut with the texture of a mushroom. Really excellent.
The photo is a bit misleading about how much you get. You discard the small and tiny mushrooms (which are aborted) and the stems (which are tough).
Now to see if I can get another bloom out of my bag of wet straw.
Meanwhile I see that here you can buy a kit that enables you to grow three different colors of Oyster mushrooms in 15 roles of toilet paper. Boiling water is involved.
I got just what I deserved for my birthday; a bag of wet straw.
My family and I are dutifully keeping it wet. We mist it every few hours. We keep it in a big bag so it doesn’t dry out.
Fungus is blooming out the sides of my bag of wet straw.
Soon, dinner.