I recently bought (via eBay) a copy of The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker. All the cartoons are on two CD (as PDF) and selected cartoons are in a very big heavy book. I copied them off the CDs and I’ve been paging thru them. They are a fascinating historical document. For example there is a period in the late 50s of cartoons about the rest of the world hating us that could be recycled today.

I can’t, of course, show you any of these – but they are great fun for visual thinking.

There is a cartoon who’s caption reads “What the Lemmings think.” and it shows the river of lemmings pouring off the cliff, into flight, and up into the heavens. I was reminded of that by the Robert X. Cringely essay today that reports that there is 20+ billion dollars of VC money that just has to be invested in the next 12 months, but the poor lemmings haven’t found a cliff yet. He, tongue firmly in cheek, recommends cell-processors.

Since the week demands it he also has a few choice words about HP’s troubles.

Knowing she was not what she was claiming to be, Carly’s management technique was to be charming and brutal, to throw HP through a succession of mergers and reorgs that kept any potential adversary from gaining a power base. Note that this week, there simply is no clear internal successor as CEO, nor is the company even thinking of looking inside because any talent there was run off long ago.

The big problem with running a company this way is that it always ends badly

That sounds about right. HP’s course changes have seemed pretty clueless over the last few years and I’ve certainly seen that pattern more than once in my life. Trouble is, the behavior management exhibits in that scenario is almost identical to the behavior when the firm has severe group-think, it’s business model is dried up, and a huge course correction is it’s only hope. At that point management is more like a convivial but suddenly desperate animal and that just looks like a convivial but basically clueless act.

Of course all those tags are worth money.

… the price that advertisers paid for keywords dropped an average three percent,…

…28 percent drop in Telecom-Wireless products and services from $1.09 to $.79, possibly reflecting the trend to give cell phones as a gift during the holidays. … Consumer-Retail category … decreased … 11 percent

Fathom Online, a leading SEM, tracks keyword prices daily and even hourly to spot trends and to provide its clients advantageous buying opportunities.

— Fathom Online

I’m not sure I like what appears to be in the pipeline at Google, but then a9 is mixing things up so here comes the future.

There is a cultural dialectic that draws into opposition institutions v.s. people. Since institutions were once led by kings and lords this is, in a sense, “The Man” v.s. “The People.” Dominate dialectics draw things into their thrall. Everything get’s assigned to one side or the other. Cats? Independent, ok you go over there with “The People”. Dog? Dutiful agent of the Man.

So, who’s side is the Net on? If your into the above dialectic and you think the Net is cool then your going to want to lay claim to the Net for you side in the argument. If your a designer or builder using the Net then your going to strive to bend it to your side.

Not everybody is into this dialectic. So plenty of actors in the net are building and describing events without taking sides in this particular argument. Consider for example a commercial start up that wants to use the Internet to disrupt an existing market. When they speak to their investors they tell a story about creating a huge powerful durable institution that will own an emerging market place – in this story they are pro-institution. Their investors say “You is the man!” When they speak to their early adopters they talk about empowering individuals and sticking it to the existing players in the market – in this story they are pro-the-people. I fully expect some large food conglomerate to end up owing the copyright on ‘We are the World.’ As a social or economic construct the disruptive startup doesn’t take a side in the dialectic; it just grabs the framework for PR purposes.

The stories we tell about what we are creating do in fact shape what gets created.

A good example of this is the end-to-end design principle. Consider two stories you can tell about it. There is a technical story about it’s reliability, scalability, security, and it’s coordination costs. There is another story you can tell about it’s political nature; i.e. that it disrupts and continuously undermines centralization of power. When you do that your moments away from bringing issues of free speech (He who own’s the printing press, etc) into the discussion.

Who knows were I’m going with this? I’m not currently comfortable with the way this dialectic is polarizing the discussion of events in the Net.

For example Blogging. I see blogging not as empowering the-people, but instead as atomizing them. For example tagging/folksonomy where I see much excitement about displacing existing institutions that nurture taxonomy but no useful discussion of how to encourage a bloom of billions of cool new organizational schemes.

But I’m not quite getting out of this posting alive, ah well.

Here’s a fun idea, a generalization of MIME types.

As a prolog let’s look as details of one of two one-click subscription solutions mentioned in the prior posting. The one that avoids a central hub/server but instead requires that we do some rework on all the clients. That cost got me thinking about how to pack more value into the rework.

In the blog subscription scenario the blog offers a “subscribe now!” button. Clicking it sends to their browser/reader a document which the browser/reader reacts to by creating a subscription. That action is triggered by the MIME type of the document. In Tim’s scenario MIME type is application/atom+xml.

If your managing your blog feeds using a local news reader as I am (e.g. NetNewsWire) then it’s an easy matter for the reader to register as the handler for that MIME type. Things are a bit harder if your new’s reader a web site, for example BlogLines. In that case you need to install something that catches incoming documents of this MIME type and turns around and hands them off to the web site.

Can we generalize this idea? Certainly. How much value can we pack in this subscription offer MIME type?

A simple step up in the idea is to create a MIME type document bouncer. An application you install on your machine and when a document of a given mime type is received or opened it turns around and redirects that document off to helpful website. For example such a beast could help users view documents that aren’t widely supported. There are plenty of these! This would useful.

A nice improvement on that would be to provide a way that helpful websites could plug into this easily. For example. Bob implement a service that can convert documents of MIME type ‘application/powerpoint’ into other formats – for example SVG, Open Office, etc. Bob’s website is a pain to use. Bob needs a way to tell the document bouncing application about his service. So he adds “Add Converter” button his site. Should the user click that a document sent to the user’s reader/browser (might have the type application/dispatch-offer). That gets handed off to the document bouncer which update’s it’s dispatch-tables/pattern-matchers and next time a document of type application/powerpoint come over the threshold it can offer our happy user the option of the document to Bob’s conversion service.

In my fantasy this can get even cooler. Going back to the blog example. The blogs provide a ‘Subscribe!’ button, the document that returns can describe a number a means of subscribing – email, rss, atom, whatever. The new reader(s) can place a number of patterns into the dispatch negotiation program. After hitting the subscribe button the user is presented with a menu of choices. He that allows him to route the subscription offer to the handler that is appropriate for the blog in question. He can redirect the subscribe offer to BlogLines, NetNewsWire, depending on what fits the situation.

One last step. The data feeds from blogs are just the tip of the iceberg. For example all my financial institutions have data that I pull down from them in service of keeping my financial house in order. Each one of these ought to, but doesn’t, have a “get data feed” button. Stitching up the links, for example passing those links thru to my accountant, is a huge plumbing problem.

It’s a fun idea that we might be able to create a very general scheme that allows data providers to describe what they have to offer – a set of choices – in a single document. It’s also a fun idea that data consumers could describe what they offer to handle. Giving the the offer to provide, and offer to handle a MIME type and a manager that the user controls we can keep the user control of making these linkages, where he belongs, while making the user’s experience tractable.

At one point in David Weinberger’s delightful after dinner speech he’s working thru some thoughts on ontologies and tagging by describing how odd the 200’s are in the Dewey Decimal system. “The Buddhists, their to the right of the decimal point.”

He then asks why hasn’t this been fixed. The short answer is “immovable installed base,” but Dave has much more fun with it by asking his listeners to visualize librarians slowly scrapping the white paint off the back of millions of volumes as they convert to the upgraded version.

Two things came to mind when I read that. First is the way that a finite field of integers creates scarcity, so if there are only N digits in the product bar code you must establish a central registry and that in turn creates a hub, which in turn creates a point of power. The fixed sized fields for IP numbers are another example. Even if you design for unlimited abundance, as for example the domain name system strived to do, you still get forces that lead to scarcity. It’s nice to have a short domain name. It’s nice to own .com.

The second thing that came to mind was how the immovable installed base is on the one hand the object of desire. What the capitalist is seeks to own. Since immovable installed base is but another name for loyal users. While on the other hand it is what the many fear. The careful designer of an ontology lives in fear his legacy will not be the next Dewey Decimal system but rather that he shunted the 360 Million Buddhists to the right of the decimal point. This gives him pause, it slows him down.

The puzzles, not to be lightly tossed aside, are thus. Does the internet’s culture of abundance sufficiently lowers this risk that our designer can to set this particular fear? How do we preclude the key ontologies from being privately owned in the way that Westlaw owns the pointers into all case law.

Dave Weinberger gives a very nice after dinner speech!

nota bena: any illusions about said ethos maybe set aside by this

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone,” it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

Today, blizzard is ours!

30 years ago I worked for a company that had retained habits from yet another 30 years earlier. One of those was that each employee was expected to maintain a lab notebook. These books were bound with numbered pages of graph paper. The binding and number was to prevent any temptation to tear out pages. The idea being that your recorded thought processes weren’t to be tampered with.

By that point in time new employees were no longer given training in how to use their notebooks. My father though explained to me that in his day the ritual was to begin each day by enumerating each and every thought about the work that had occurred since the book was last opened; then thru out the day notes would be recorded about all your activities. Some of my coworkers at that time would make marvelously ornate doodles in their lab books during meetings and other people would complain about them much the same way people not complain about the IM back channel.

I often tell people that I use my Blog as a lab book. It’s a much better analogy than “diary”, “magazine”, “newspaper”, “radio talk show” because it’s rare that the listener personal experience with a lab book. It answers the query buy it doesn’t pin me down much.

I do like to the use the blog as a way to create a string of beads along this or that thread in my thoughts. I don’t feel these beads need to be particularly well formed, just a bit more solid than a passing whim; but certainly not defensible to any particular degree.

One way the blog is different from the Lab Book is how public it is. The Lab Book was always considered the joint property of the firm and the employee; but in the end the firm would retain ownership when the employee left the firm.

It’s interesting how the personality of documents (lab book, memo, spreadsheet, powerpoint, etc.) shape the nature of the work.