January 2008

A few days ago I wrote a post and linked to an Aspen Institute report titled The Rise of Collective Intelligence - Decentralized Co-Creation of Value as a New Paradigm of Commerce and Culture.

Today I’d like to offer readers an example of new tools and web services operating in social networks that in my opinion make the concepts and observations in the report come alive. The example involves people using search, content, collaboration and sharing, which are all central elements of the ecosystems of commerce and culture in which we will all be living, working and consuming.

There’s a small company up here in Vancouver, British Columbia (the warm and beautiful part of the Great White North of North America) that develops social networking platforms and customized elearning solutions. The Donat Group is also creating a social music initiative (Project Opus), a part of which involves Mixxmaker, a web service that helps music lovers build playlists collaboratively. Building playlists collaboratively creates a "Social Object", offering people a means of co-creating value around music they like and want to share with others they know.

We all know that the music industry is in real turmoil, and is searching frantically for new business logic and new business models. The major participants have all been under pressure from free downloads, and the price of music is under pressure as never before. Where will additional value, and eventually revenue, come from ?

David Gratton is the founder of the Donat Group, Project Opus and Mixxmaker. David recently wrote a post about why the digital packaging around music, especially as a social object, can and will be of value. Mainly, being able to search for, locate, aggregate and acquire various elements about a song or an artist that someone likes will help create meaning and in turn value.

He also wrote about ‘who’ is involved in the co-creation of this new form of value … or in other words how the market for value associated with songs is being broken up and then co-created anew.   Doing this around a playlist that is built in collaboration with others also helps mightily in creating connections and trust, and lays a foundation for putting the dynamics of word-of-mouth marketing into dynamic operation.

It’s important to note here that David and his colleagues at Project Opus and Mixxmaker put a lot of work into staying within the bounds of Fair Use, an all-important consideration when exploring new paradigms for creating (or co-creating in this case) potentially new economic value.

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Once people start building today’s equivalent of albums together with their friends, the changes to the ways music is distributed and acquired will continue to diversify away from purchasing CDs, as David has noted.  But people will still want that unusual album cover from the old vinyl days, or the most recent YouTube video clip of a given band’s performance, or a series of photos from Flickr (carrying the appropriate Creative Commons license, to be sure) to add to their own personal collection of digital artefacts about that kind of music, that band, that group of friends .. and so on.

It’s a pity, really, that this fun and easy-to-use capability exists only as a Facebook application at the moment.  I seem to be observing a rapidly-growing trend of people turning down invitations to add another Facebook application to their Facebook profile (I am one of those people).  While supposedly Mark Zuckerberg is aware of the growing dissatisfaction .. and you’d think the Beacon fiasco was notice enough … it’s hard to shake the sense that Facebook and its partner applications are all really just looking for ways to maximize page views and ad impression. 

That, for me, does not fall into the category of decentralized co-creation of value, no matter how you spin it.

But .. I suspect that in the coming months and years we’ll see many more examples of applications and services like Mixxmaker that let and / or help people co-create online things that they care about and enjoy.

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Tags: Aspen Institute, Decentralized Co-creation of Value, Donat Group, Project Opus, Mixxmaker, Facebook

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Further to my recent post about the early start to training for my bid to claim the title at the 2nd Annual Kits Duel at the Pool, this afternoon I put in my third 2000 metre swim of the week (the week starts on Sunday).

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Swimming oneself back into shape is not the the same easy glide through the water it was when I was 25, I’ll tell you.

In the last couple of days I have received email notifications that several highly-trusted friends of mine have posted a message to the Super wall on my Facebook profile page.

Here below is an excerpt from and a link to a report just published by the recent Aspen Institute’s Communications and Society program.

In a recent post on the FASTForward blog I mentioned a growing awareness of the impact of the interconnected digital infrastructure and digital natives on the Enterprise 2.0 market.  The publication of this Aspen Institute report is to me just one more piece of evidence that it’s real and growing … and it’s a credible source (though not quite a tangible case study

David Bollier reports from his OnTheCommons blog about the report titled "The Rise of Collective Intelligence: Decentralized Co-Creation of Value as a New Paradigm in Commerce and Culture” (pdf) published by the Aspen Institute.

It may be that the serious jargon of the term "collective intelligence" will put some (or many) off, but increasingly it seems to be becoming clear that the interactive social construction of knowledge put to use in response to constantly dynamic markets is demanding some new business logic, new points of friction with which to fashion transaction and new ways of designing and managing the work that leads to the creation of economic value.

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The Rise Of Collective Intelligence

Most forwarding-thinking businesses are starting to realize that they need to come to terms with the open Internet environment. This means making some radical changes in how they think about markets, how they structure their own enterprises and how they treat customers.

[ Snip ... ]

On the Internet, people have acquired considerable powers of their own. They have developed their own sustainable micro-cultures. They can create their own commons to carry on conversations among peers and develop new forms of reliable “collective intelligence.”

This bottom-up knowledge empowers ordinary individuals to approach market transactions on a more equal footing with sellers, who have historically had greater market power and knowledge. The commoners are able to capture more of the knowledge they create, and use it to their own advantage. Indeed, the commons can be regarded as a source of cutting-edge R&D for companies, as MIT professor Eric von Hippel has shown in his book, Democratizing Innovation.

The phrase that the conference used to describe this phenomenon is “decentralized co-creation of value.” It means that the market is not the sole source of value-creation; dispersed online communities are now sources of value that businesses must collaborate with in order to generate value.

The commons stands on a more equal footing with the market. Instead of all “value” coming from centralized players like corporations, increasingly, value is coming from the “ends” of the Internet – the periphery, where new ideas and innovations first materialize. Value comes from individuals, and groups of individuals, operating in the free space of the commons, where overhead is low to nonexistent, and creativity is not regimented to service prearranged market niches. Thanks to the Internet, social niches are becoming “staging areas” for viable niche markets, a phenomenon also known as the “Long Tail.”

All of these developments create a real crunch for traditional large corporations because large companies like to have extreme control. That’s how they deliver predictable results to investors and protect their brand reputation. But on the Internet, control and predictability are not viable strategies. In fact, they are counter-productive.

Value is generated by having less control. Customers won’t trust a company that tries to use digital rights management or bullying tactics to assert too much control. In a sense, companies are not just competing against other companies, but against the freedoms of the commons.

The challenge for businesses, then, is to develop new sorts of “open business” models that can respect the social dynamics of the Internet, while still monetizing certain forms of value (e.g., selling advertising to the Web users who like your site). Companies have to realize that brands are forms of socially created value; brands are not simply the result of advertising and image campaigns. Online communities create and promote a brand every bit as much as mass media.

One of the most fascinating parts of the report is about the next generation of computing, often known as “The Cloud.” Bill Coleman, the entrepreneur who started BEA Systems and recently started the Cassatt Corporation, describes the Cloud as the convergence of voice, data and video in a networked system that also combines computing, telecommunications and the Internet. You plug your computing appliance into The Cloud – and all your data and stuff is “there,” not on your personal computer.

Everyone at the conference agreed that the current trends in economics and technology will make The Cloud inevitable. Software and hardware will become commodity products, computing will become a service provided by very large utilities, and a handful of these Cloud providers will eventually put the telephone service industry, the cable industry and Internet service providers out of business.

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I have been for some time been calling the emergent organizing principle that I believe underpins the necessary new business logic and models, derived from social-interaction-driven market niches, "wirearchy" - a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.

I am heartened this report has come out (emerged, let’s say) from a group of bright and aware people at the Aspen Institute.  I suspect that it makes those of us who feel something big and different is going on bit by byte, link by link … a bit less iconoclastic.

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Tags: Collective intelligence, new business logic, new business models, ROII, Return On Investment in Interaction, cloud computing, co-creating value, decentralization, wirearchy, hierarchy

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Ean Jackson is an interesting guy.

Via the Guardian (UK)

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The life and crimes of the music biz

Simon Napier-Bell

[ Snip ... ]

Yet it’s nothing but a flytrap. Artists go there dreaming of being signed. But out of every 10 signed nine will fail. A contract with a major record company was always a 90 per cent guarantee of failure. In the boardroom the talk was never of music, only of units sold. Artists were never the product; the product was discs - 10 cents’ worth of vinyl selling for $10 - 10,000 per cent profit - the highest mark-up in all of retail marketing. Artists were simply an ingredient, without even the basic rights of employees.

Imagine the outcry if people working in a factory were told that the cost of the products they were making would be deducted from their wages, which anyway would only be paid if the company managed to sell the products. Or that they would have to work for the company for a minimum of 10 years and, at the company’s discretion, could be transferred to any other company at any time.

Recently, the Wall Street Journal investigated the industry and concluded that ‘for all the 21st-century glitz that surrounds it, the popular music business is distinctly medieval in character: the last form of indentured servitude.’

As long as the major record companies controlled the industry, artists had to accept these conditions. But the majors’ grip on things has almost gone. For years they saw it coming but did little to change things. Now each week brings them more gloom. CD sales are down on last year, which were down on the year before, and the year before that. Sony and BMG amalgamated, but brought themselves little benefit in doing so. EMI and Warners tried to go the same route, but failed. So EMI was taken over by someone with no knowledge of the record industry. Guy Hands of Terra Firma fame promised to reinvent the whole business plan; he started by parting company with Radiohead.

But outside of the industry, who cares? Pop music has never sounded better or more vibrant, never been more easily available to the listener.

The only people who are suffering are the people who brought it on themselves. The major record companies.

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The picture story The Rule of Law From the Shahidul News newsletter

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[Snip ... ]

Biking along the footpath, not strictly legal, was slowed by the vending stalls and bus ticket counters that had sprung up. Legality was not such a big thing here. Last night, the guards had caught a guy stealing copper cabling. The thief was a "heroinchi". They had roughed him up and let him go. Taking the guy to the police wouldn’t have helped. The police would have got richer and the guy would be out stealing again. People take law into their own hands. Bribes are common-place, violence is normalised, nepotism is ripe. Despite the rhetoric at the top, abuse of power is the order of the day.

But there is a sub-text.

It was wrong of the heroinchi to have stolen the cable, for me to have used the footpath, for the vendors to have taken over public pathways, for the policeman to have taken bribes. Except in my case, there were mitigating circumstances that made all of the other acts less of a crime. The heroinchi had his addiction to blame. The vendors had no other place to go, police salaries were impossible to live on. They might have found other solutions, but they broke the law instead.

Unlawful, but not sinister.

I saw other things along the way. The policeman in Gulistan Mor puncturing the tyre of a rickshaw walla caught on a road reserved for cars. A policeman on Nawabpur Road, punching a rickshaw walla for some other reason. True, rickshaw wallas don’t always obey the law. But no policeman would have punctured the wheel of a car. No drug baron would ever be roughed up, no hotel owner would ever be shooed off his establishment. Few police cars would ever pass a fitness test. The more swank olive green cars, parked illegally, would never be challenged.

When power is flouted with such abandon, corruption seeps to all levels. Ordinary people are simply too small to challenge the system. The rule of law must apply to all if it is to work. When the ruling party cannot be challenged, when a military rank gives total authority, when being in power means laws no longer apply, the law of the streets becomes the law of the land.

[Snip ... ]

To convict and then provide presidential pardon, is an act of self-deification by the government. Those with less clout will continue to languish in jail. A dark and violent jail they should never have entered. If the judiciary be truly independent, then it should call to the docks those who ordered a military occupation of our university. It should bring to trial those who use emergency rule to torture our citizens and muzzle the media. It should penalise those who judge others without subjecting themselves to scrutiny.

The rule of law is essential for society to live without fear. For it to apply, it must start at the top.

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It has been a really good day.

First off, it has been my birthday all day.

(cross-posted to the FastForward Enterprise 2.0 blog)

Gary Hamel has called for fundamental management innovation in his recently-published book The Future of Management.

… or in the French original "Le Scaphandre et le Papillon"

I went to the theatre tonight to take in this delicious and moving film, directed by the reknowned American artist Julian Schnabel.

Suffice it to say that there are very few movies I want to watch more than once.

Via David Weinberger’s JOHO blog in a post titled Teens Are Not Net Potatoes …

I’ll toss in one pithy (to me) point made by JP Rangaswami in his presentation at this year’s LeWeb 3:

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The digital natives now starting to flood into the workplace are already all trained up on these (social software) tools.

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Remember all the time and money spent sending people to courses to learn how to use Word, or Excel, etc. ?

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One Quarter of Teens Are Super Communicators

The Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that 93% of teens use the internet, and more of them than ever are treating it as a venue for social interaction — a place where they can share creations, tell stories, and interact with others. 64% of online teens ages 12-17 have participated in one or more among a wide range of content-creating activities on the internet, up from 57% of online teens in a similar survey at the end of 2004.

Girls continue to dominate most elements of content creation:

* 35% of all teen girls blog, compared with 20% of online boys
* 54% of wired girls post photos online compared with 40% of online boys.
* 19% of Online boys post video content online, compared to 10% of online girls who have posted a video online where others could see it.

47% of online teens have posted photos where others can see them, and 89% of those teens who post photos say that people comment on the images at least “some of the time.” Many teens, however, limit access to content that they share.

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I was lucky enough to spend 3 and 1/2 days in Amsterdam in early December, and one of them was even sunny.

Here are some shots I took for posterity

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BubbleShare: Share photos - Find great Clip Art Images.

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In any event, that’s not really what I wanted to note this morning. Instead, a similar thought occurred to me in another context. I’ve been frustrated for a long time with the underlying conceit behind the notion that "markets are conversations." This metaphorical "framing," has, to me, been one of the most hideous and socially corrosive notions to come along in a very long time. Yet it has been embraced as somehow something that is informed, enlightened, indeed, even liberating and I have consistently failed to understand how anyone could believe that.

But now I think I understand.

Economic systems are a form of technology, and as such, they intermediate our perception of reality. Capitalism, or perhaps more accurately, consumerism or commercialism, has been a fantastically "successful" technology, creating vast quantities of financial "wealth." (Along with a significant downside cost we simply dismiss.) It therefore shapes our view of "reality," to include our social interactions, which preceded all our economic theories.

So indeed, our social interactions, our "being" as "social beings" is interpreted in an economic "framework," and "being" is ultimately subordinated to the framework of "commerce," hence "markets are conversations." This is not a good thing, but I don’t know of a successful competing technological or even metaphorical framework I can impose which might alter the current state of affairs.

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See Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom, circa 1941.

See also Wealth Bondage, Phil Cubeta, circa 2002.

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UPDATE:

I think the concept and term "social object" have been stretched and pulled any which way to try to establish it as a marketing buzzword (what isn’t a potential candidate for that these days ?) but I also believe there are some things that are truly social objects.

As suggested at the conclusion of this brief ZDNet article, Microsoft’s bid for FAST Search and Transfer is likely to lead to a significant consolidation in the enterprise search field.

Microsoft will no doubt bold, weld or stitch FAST’s capabilities onto the Sharepoint collaboration portfolio, and on we go

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Microsoft offers to buy FAST for $1.2 billion; Likely to trigger enterprise search consolidation

Microsoft said Tuesday that it will offer $1.2 billion in cash for Fast Search and Transfer (FAST), a big player in the enterprise search market.

The move is sure to shake up the enterprise search market, which thus far has been dominated by a series of smaller players like FAST, Autonomy and Vivisimo. Google has made some inroads, but for the most part the market is the realm of niche players. Microsoft is about to change that with FAST.

You can expect Google to make a purchase in enterprise search along with traditional enterprise players like HP, IBM and the usual suspects.

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Tags: Microsoft, FAST, Enterprise 2.0, consolidation, integration

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I am sooo lucky !

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BubbleShare: Share photos - Play some Online Games.

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Via Atrios

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Thanks to Listics for pointing to this …

Where and what will consuming AND creating next lead us to ?

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Thanks to Digby’s Hullabaloo for the link.

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… by William "Papa" Meloney VII.

Thanks to Frank Paynter of Listics for pointing to this new-to-me blog which I like.

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Open Papa Predictions for 2008

Linux Mini-laptops

Beginning just after "Tax Time" there will be a run on OLPCs and ASUS Eee PCs. Once computer users are let out of the MS-Box they will quickly realize that the power and features of these and other small form laptops is perfectly suited to their everyday computing needs.

Real prediction: Enthusiastic reception of the Linux based mini-laptop will cause a landslide acceptance of Linux on the Desktop.

Bonus link: Noahpad

(My addendum … The Noahpad looks VERY interesting. Here’s a case where it would be very cool if the device could license Mac OS)

Google Tribulations

Coming under the privacy watchers fearful gaze Google will begin to reveal what will come to be known as the gShiner, the GoOgle - the Google blackeye. I view this as an unfortunate side effect of Google’s main mission - to acquire and provide information upon request. Privacy watchers will insist that it is too much personal information. Google will suffer a blackeye for doing well exactly what it is used for…by everyone - vanity searches.

Real Prediction: Google, to stay competitive in the ‘Information Display’ market will release a new AI based criteria parser that significantly improves the average user’s search experience. By implementing a more ‘common-language’ parser Google will be able to reduce the returned ‘hits’ to a much more succinct and manageable number.

Microsoft will rush MinWin to market …

Realizing that Papa’s Prediction #1 is bearing down on them like a run-away freight train Microsoft will begin to do what they do best… FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt). Claiming that their ’small foot print, fully Windows compatible’ version of MiniWini (MeanieWeenie) is just around the corner Microsoft will attempt to undermine common sense and the public’s realization that surfing and internet are the only things they really do with any PC.

Real Prediction: Microsoft will implode! With revenue falling at a rate of 32 feet per second squared the Redmond Giant will come tumbling down the economic bean stalk at breakneck speed.

The real Real Prediction: Microsoft will slowly begin to release the Linux based versions of its "popular" applications. And foolishly try to sell them at bloated MS-Prices.

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Via deer Hunting for Jesus

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They’re burning kids alive over here!

[ Snip ...]

The fact is, to quote our late unlamented Secretary of Defense …

(Honest to God, Joe, as I’m typing this, I’m overhearing a conversation by some fellow in this corporate office where I’m a contractor — his comment, and I quote, is "Do you know anybody in the Air Force? Because my brother is over there and he called me and said ‘They’re burning kids alive over here!’ We gotta find some way to make people hear this.")

Okay, that was disturbing, but it makes my point. To quote Rumsfeld, "We don’t know what we don’t know." The news media, from NPR to the Washington Post, is owned by the same corporations that are supplying weaponry for this occupation.

It’s the stories that AREN’T being covered that are the most important.

Are Iraqi children being burned alive? If the news refuses to report it, how would we know? Are American citizens being disappeared? If the news doesn’t carry the story, we would not know.

Even when we know of people being disappeared, such as AP photographer Bilal Hussein who has been held almost two years without charges, is it the lead story in the news? Or is it barely mentioned anywhere?

Why not? Because the corporations that pay for the elections of our Congresspeople and that run the news organizations and that supply the weapons in Iraq, these corporations don’t want us discussing Bilal Hussein at the water cooler. They want us discussing Lindsay and Brittney and Madeline McCann, safe, non-political issues.

(Wow, this is weird. Now I just got a text message from a very conservative, non-political friend of mine: "23,000 civilians died in Iraq in 07. Worse than 06. how does this make the usa better than sadham. Geez. Terrible." All original spelling.)

I dunno, Joe. I started this message intending to reiterate Pablo’s warnings. But what I’m experiencing is that some of us DO know what’s going on, and we’re finding our own ways of communicating that news, independent of corporate-owned media.

Maybe that’s what it takes — going AROUND the bastards.

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Bhutto never would have saved Pakistan

"She seemed more American than Pakistani in her style and attitudes, but beneath the Radcliffe and Harvard veneer she also seemed like thousands of other young upper-class women from Pakistan and India who were floating around London at the time. They called one another by girlish nicknames like "Bubbles", they didn’t take anything very seriously (including their studies), and they seemed destined for a life of idle privilege.

Then Benazir Bhutto went back to Pakistan in 1977, just about the time that Zia had her father sentenced to death in a rigged trial. He was hanged in 1979, and Benazir was thrown into jail for five years. But when she came out after Zia died, she was already the head of the party her father had founded, the Pakistan People’s Party, and by 1988 she was prime minister. She was only 35.

She was prime minister twice, from 1988 to 1990 and 1993 to 1996, and she was removed from power both times on corruption charges. The charges have never been proved in court, but the evidence of kickbacks and commissions to her husband, Asif Zardari, is pretty overwhelming. But that was not the real problem.

The problem was that she never seemed to have any goal in politics apart from vindicating her father by leading his party back to power. At the start she was hugely popular, but she wasted her opportunity to make real changes in Pakistan because she had no notion (beyond the usual rhetoric) of what a better Pakistan would look like. Pakistan is already pretty good for her sort of people, so it should not surprise us that there was almost nothing to show for her years in office.

If she had become prime minister again, which was a quite likely outcome of the current crisis, there is no reason to believe that she would have done any better this time. Her assassination just makes it harder to solve the crisis at all.

[ Snip ... ]

Look east to India, west to Iran, or north to China, and, by comparison, Pakistan’s political demography is absolutely feudal. So long as that remains the case, it is absurd to imagine that democracy will solve Pakistan’s problems. I admired Benazir Bhutto’s courage, and I am very sorry that she was killed, but she could never have been Pakistan’s saviour."

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It means the next 20 or 30 years is all about a pretty fundamental re-working of what we understand as more-or-less normal sociology in the social structures we have known.

Via CNN.com

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The digital world is inescapable.

And whether it’s advances in social networking, mobile technology or medical equipment, seismic changes seem possible nearly every day.

What does it all mean for us ?

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… and I found myself wondering if they could be construed as a "Social Object" ?

I was being only semi-conscious this morning, trawling (not trolling) through a blog site I had not visited for quite a while.

I don’t know how I ended up in November 2003, but I did.

Dana Blankenhorn in a ZDNet article about the continuing erosion of net neutrality.

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Battle for the network will mark 2008

Here is my second prediction for 2008.

We’re going to see a more intense battle for control of the Internet, and at least during this year open source advocates will lose.

Having won a shared monopoly over the last several years, cable giants like Comcast and phone giants AT&T and Verizon have been taking the first moves to destroy network neutrality in 2007.

The guess here is that this will accelerate.

One reason is that gear for deep packet inspection is becoming ubiquitous in corporate networks. In 2008 it will give network owners the power to control what goes through the core.

A second reason is that these giant companies want to grow margins with “value added” — network control is the service they’ve been talking about for a decade.

A third reason is that the government, in its infinite ignorance, is pressing for more Internet controls to stop crime.

The practical result is that ordinary consumers may soon find it impossible to do things they now take for granted, like use BitTorrent. Sophisticated users, and the criminals who are the target of government’s ire, will write and use the needed code, continuing on as before.

A second battle will be joined in the wireless space. Google will not win a national footprint at auction. Straw bidders and other phone company allies will win the day, because AT&T has more to lose from an open network than Google has to gain from one.

All this could combine to make the Internet a real election issue for the first time. Given the kind of rhetoric and reaction we’ve seen on other issues in this decade, it won’t be pretty.

Power isn’t given up lightly, and a monopoly gives its owner immense power. No matter how nice and warm the present owners of monopoly power may be, you can be sure as night follows day they will be succeeded by folks who are not so nice.

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… is, I think, the most common refrain I have heard over the last several years when talking to people about blogging and participating in the use of social media.

My response has typically been that if you’re anything like almost everyone else that sits down behind a screen at work, you’re already doing 80% + of what you would be doing if you were to take up blogging or the use of social media.

Harold Jarche, Dave Pollard and others (including me) call this interaction with information, images, links and other people "personal knowledge management (PKM)".

Basically, I think you don’t have the time to NOT do it.

I’ve borrowed Harold’s graphic (below) without asking permission, though I am pretty certain he will grant same.  I am not certain that it is a graphic he has developed, though there is no attribution in his post and so I am assuming (Harold being very net savvy and all) that it comes from him.  Thus, I am attributing it to him.

The "blog - discuss - reflect" loop at the bottom of his diagram is such a basic and powerful dynamic … it underscores why I think blogging more or less as we know it will last and last, on and on, as a basic element of Net sociology.  It engenders and propels personal (and sometimes group) learning and development.

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PKM - My Best Tool

I know people who get hundreds of e-mail each day. I don’t.

I also meet people who work in companies and have to make decisions or set direction but who do not have time to read.

I can understand how time constraints force you to reduce “discretionary” activities such as reading, but how are you able to learn if you don’t take the time to read, listen, reflect and then make your own understanding explicit for others to understand?

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Tags: Harold Jarche, flow, effectiveness, personal knowledge management

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Here’s a bunch of dots for you.

A couple of whiz kids (Harvard, hedge funds) get the bright idea to measure the effectiveness of charities, promote accountability and offer services for guiding philanthropic activity.