Interesting conversation going on in semi-public between Dave Winer and John Robb about getting credit for your work.

My personal take on this is that ideas struggle to get out and that we all work damn hard trying to help them. The way high tech markets are means that a lot of us end up holding a dirty shovel while other folks wander off with the bag of gold. The example that John and Dave are puzzling about is common. Most of us who work hard in this field will have that experience along with it’s near neighbors; for example Mr. What Could A-Beans. They don’t tell you that in school; but as Dave used to say “Dig we Must.”

The element of this pattern that seems to get my goat isn’t not getting credit. It’s watching fine rich complex ideas get turned into naive cartoons. Watching babies I’ve cared for get pinned to a wall and desiccated. For example I know a few dozen reasons why open source works. But then some actor comes on the stage and announces with great dramatic effect: “It is all just status seeking.” For few afterward the audience knows that’s the answer and the entire movement suffers as a consequence.

The cartoon phase is what happens as the ideas are repurposed to serve the goals of actors further down the supply chain. What Paul Krugman calls the “Policy Entrepreneurs.” Here’s a typical sentence that illustrates how he finds this species distasteful ” am also unable to pretend to respect ‘policy entrepreneurs’, the intellectually dishonest self-proclaimed experts who tell politicians what they want to hear.” These actors are no different than the rest of us; they are looking of a place to get some positive feedback. If you frame an idea in certain ways you get a commercially viable product. Frame it another you get a fat book deal. Frame it another you a durable notch in the belt of your reputation. Frame it as a open source project with sufficient worse-is-better affordances for other people to play and you create a bloom of activity that is really fun to watch.

A generous nature tends to give a lot of stuff away. If you get bitter about what the other guys do picking thru what your shovel leaves behind then it’s hard to remain generous. Hoarding isn’t pretty. In some market’s hoarding is best option; it’s a good thing when things are scarce. Ideas aren’t scarce.

We have all sat in the final meeting of a conference or the tail end of a dinner and had to suffer thru the thank you speech. One of organizers gets up and launches into thanking absolutely every person who did as much as think about unfolding a chair. On an on they go. But that’s exactly right. The generous stream of contributions that make a thing work needs to be matched with a similarly generous flow of credit.

So. Thank you John and Dave for all your work to reinvigorate authoring on the web. Your absolutely right. The web is not about watching, listening, reading; but it’s also about acting, speaking, writing.

Oh, and if it’s any comfort as soon as they allow cell phones on airplanes the whole market for golly gee business books will collapse.

I totally agree..

Utter bollocks. Mr Brolsma’s performance could only be described that way by someone with no capacity at all to recognize good comedy. The video is hilarious and, to anyone with eyes in their head, was supposed to be. It’s not earnest, it’s deadpan. I am sorry to say that Americans are renowned for their inability to grasp this distinction. Despite the article’s efforts to draw a parallel, it’s obviously a real performance, not a private bit of wish-fulfillment… it’s funny, you gobshites! And it’s meant to be!

Yesterday’s quiz was can you see the pattern here

Here you can buy 8-12 frogs legs. Here you can buy some sausages. You can get a thousand kinds of stamps over here. Need supplies for your revenge fantasies? Or maybe your ears are cold?

These all small online store running an open source software package called osCommerce.

If you search for “Powered by osCommerce” you get some very very impressive page counts; four and a half million pages at Google, eleven million pages at AllTheWeb. The real fun begins if you add niche products that your curious about. Sausage for example and you can get your safety sausage or your pewter sausage chain.

I wandered upon osCommerce because I was kicking the tires on Paypals’ developer network. Developer networks are a tool firms use to encourage a network of complementary products to appear around thier offering. There I came upon their list of this list of around 200 shopping cart or store fronts. Nice little example of a long tail. If you look at the other larger payment solutions you’ll see a similar list; for example at authorize net.

This illustration shows this business scheme. The payment companies, people like Paypal and Authorize Net, want a lot of shops to integrate with them. So they offer a developer network to attract the vendors who serve shop owners. Those vendors, the guys that make shopping cart solutions, join the developer network and use it’s services to integrate their offerings with those of the payment company. The more successful the developer network becomes the more this drawing begins to look just like the drawing that describes an exchange standard.

Which is probably because from an appropriate distance they are the same drawing. The work that a developer network does as it campaigns to attract developer members, get them to sign up, integrate, and succeed is identical to the work a standards body ought to do as it campaigns to drive adoption of it’s offering. Both the standards body and the developer network are attempting to define a platform (represented in these drawings by the line below the exchange or integration).

When I look at a group (a business, a project, etc.) one of the things I look for is how rich their set of connections is, their complements. One way to look for that is to find their developer network. Another way is to look at their customers. osCommerce is amazing because of the diversity of the store owners that use them.

I didn’t get a job once. Have I told this story? They had me in for the interview. But I think that was just because they wanted to tell me the bad news. My letter wasn’t folded correctly. There is, it appears, a correct way to fold and insert a letter into an envelope. The CEO told me this right at the beginning of my interview.

Later, a different job. It was my first day on the job and I cheerfully informed this company’s CEO that I was dyslexic. The look on his face would have frightened others. I’d seen it before so I shrugged it off. People seem to get over it. The next day they instituted a three writing sample requirement on all new hires.

I was terribly amused by a scene in the movie Lemony Snicket. One of the good characters is deeply committed to the value of good grammar. When the vile count forces her to pen her own suicide note she leaves a coded message in the text. Each letter of the coded message marked off with a spelling or grammatical error. Of course the evil person, like myself, would be blind to these.

I’m aware that this handicap drives some people absolutely crazy. Good news. In the best traditions of leveraging the contributions of the many I have now added a way you can scratch that itch. Below each entry there is now a “Typo” button. Hit it and you can send me your corrections! Talent Scrapping

Update: Two fixes so far on this one. Thanks!

The benefit of owning a standard is that you get to control the fate of it’s community of complements. With luck and hard work you can use your whatever you want to call it, (ownership, leadership, power) to do a number of things. You can use that control to shape where the market goes. You move the immovable, i.e. the installed base forward. That’s key because it helps you to avoid being displaced by tech. innovations. Of course in the best scenario, for you, you get to draw off a tax from the market that spins up around your standard. Owning the land a city is built on, so to speak, and charging some rent.

So you get land grabs, attempts to move really quickly to define a standard and get a community of complements to appear around it. For some entrepreneurial startups this is the whole business plan. It’s a pattern that can demand a lot of capital, so it’s synergistic with the VC approach. Sometime this approach goes like a firework and nothing is left but an echo. Sometimes you get the walking dead. Sometimes you almost make it. Palm is a beautiful example of almost making it.

So you get war. War to control the land where an market is emerging. The wars tend to unfold more slowly. To get a standards war you need some big players who are locked in. On the one hand they need a huge installed base that ties them down. On the other hand they must see that movement is inevitable. Finally you need a rich prize, or at least the impression that big prize is in play. It makes for interesting times. Handheld computing has just this structure.

So Palm managed what the other fast movers didn’t. The Newton didn’t make it. Go didn’t make it. Magiccap didn’t make it. The first N rounds of Microsoft’s tablets haven’t. None of the calculator companies crossed over. None of the phone vendors have managed much.

Palm created a standard for how to keep your handheld in synch with the rest of your junk. A rich network of complements emerged around it. They pulled off that rare success, the land grab.

But this that standard is the slow moving kind. The cell phone industry, in particular, but also the rest of the consumer electronics industry, have huge installed bases which they can’t walk away from. So they have to fight it out.

These gorillas’ response was Synch ML. Slowly but surely they have been winning. So it’s a forgone conclusion that Palm would be forced to capitulate at some point. And now they have.

It’s curious how what was once their treasure becomes their albatross. They need to force the migration of the existing community of compliments without laying waste to their installed base. Few companies know how to do that.