Preoccupations

Business and Web 2.0

A couple of conversations recently have made me review some of the literature and links about "enterprise 2". 

From stuff I've been reading, or re-visiting:   

• Web 2.0: beyond the buzz words — Lee (Bryant), Headshift, and John Seely Brown interviewed about 'social networking, wikis, social bookmarks, blogging and RSS newsfeeds'.
  
• Connect and Develop: inside Procter & Gamble's new model for innovation. Collaborative networks extending far, far beyond the enterprise as formerly conceived. There's a good take on this by Nicholas Nova.
  
• Headshift's work at Allen & Overy. See this piece in Information World Review.  (See also my earlier post, Edging the enterprise forward.)
  
• Andrew McAfee: Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration (purchase needed). I have also found Andrew's The Teenybopper Network more than passingly interesting — 'is Facebook the shape of things to come for E2.0? Is network building a good way to bring people to collaboration technologies?'.
  
• J P Rangaswami (Chief Information Officer of Global Services for BT Group) requires no introduction here. His blog is full of fizzy, liberating ideas — for enterprise and more. What JP's done with email is reported on by Stowe (and by Jim Guterman on the O'Reilly Radar blog) — well, I'd love to know more about it and how it's going down. By the way, this is one of my favourite quotations from JP: 

I believe that Moore’s Law and Metcalfe's Law and Gilder’s Law have created an environment where it is finally possible to demonstrate the value of information technology in simple terms rather than by complex inferences and abstract arguments. 

• More links about business/enterprise and Web 2.0 here: firstly, under the tag Enterprise 2.0 on my del.icio.us account; then, on my blog, under the category commerce.  In the latter, these specific posts might be most useful: Knowledge workers, Silicon Valley comes to Oxford, Commerce and the web/Web 2.0, Commerce, innovation and Web 2.0 (again), Pro-Ams.
  
• Finally, see also Dion Hinchcliffe on the recent McKinsey & Company article, 'The next revolution in interactions' (free registration required). Over a year ago now, I clipped a bit from this here.

 

Technorati tags: business, Lee Bryant, Headshift, John Seely Brown, Andrew McAfee, J P Rangaswami

Web and speed: II

Had I seen it last Monday (the BBC reported it on Thursday), I'd have linked to this Akamai press release, Akamai and JupiterResearch Identify '4 Seconds' as the New Threshold of Acceptability for Retail Web Page Response Times, in my previous posting, Web and speed:

Based on the feedback of 1,058 online shoppers that were surveyed during the first half of 2006, JupiterResearch offers the following analysis:

• The consequences for an online retailer whose site underperforms include diminished goodwill, negative brand perception, and, most important, significant loss in overall sales.
• Online shopper loyalty is contingent upon quick page loading, especially for high-spending shoppers and those with greater tenure.
• JupiterResearch recommends that retailers make every effort to keep page rendering to no longer than four seconds.

You can download the JupiterResearch, vendor-sponsored (Akamai) report as a pdf via this page (requires registration). On page 9:

When it comes to page rendering, retailers must consider how well the site must perform in order to minimize shopper dissatisfaction. Based on recent survey data, JupiterResearch recommends that retailers make every effort to keep page rendering to no longer than four seconds. Overall, 28 percent of online shoppers will not wait longer than four seconds for a Web site page to load before leaving. Broadband users are even less tolerant of slow rendering. A full one-third of online shoppers with a broadband connection are unwilling to wait more than four seconds (compared with 19 percent of online shoppers with a dial-up connection). Consumers who have already invested in a high-speed Internet connection do so with the expectation that pages will load quickly. And, based on current availability, pricing, and adoption rates, JupiterResearch expects broadband adoption to reach nearly 78 percent of online households (or 58 percent of all US households) by 2010. The prevalence of broadband-connected online shoppers will continue to grow, and retailers must meet their expectations accordingly.

According to Akamai's press release, 

Close to half of the retailers on the Internet Retailer Top 500 list still experience site response times in excess of four seconds, demonstrating the need for site acceleration services.

(Akamai: 'the leading global service provider for accelerating content and business processes online'.)

Quite a gap between four seconds and the 'increments of 100 milliseconds' Greg Linden says Amazon was testing. For Marissa Mayer, half a second 'killed user satisfaction'.

Technorati tags: web, user experience, speed, page rendering, rendering

Customer consciousness

After Guy Jackson, Electronic Publishing Manager at Macmillan Dictionaries, left a comment on my post about the OED/KB917422 issue, I was thinking how we've come to accept that a blog posting about a product, made in some corner of the net, can be easily found by a conscientious company — or rival — and commented on … and how in this way we have a new customer/business relationship.

This was flagged up months ago by Robert Scoble when he spoke at Reboot 7 (I wrote up something about this here and there's a bit more here) and, of course, there's Robert's and Shel Israel's book, Naked Conversations — sub-title, 'How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers'.

Then, earlier today, I read Alex Barnett on 'support tagging'. Read his whole post for the background to this idea. This struck me:

Naturally, there will be those who scoff and respond to the support tagging idea along the lines of "Why? Customers should come to our support site, and open a ticket there". And that's how it's done today - make your customers come to you.

But why not reverse this completely? In one sense, this already happens today: customer conscious companies are trawling the RSS search engines and blogs looking for customer feedback / gripes / issues and post comments on those blogs (or post a blog and pingback). This is how these companies win the hearts, minds and loyalty of their customer. It's amazing customer service - a true differentiator. 

By providing a support tag, it could allow for further structuring around this 'listening to the blogs customer support' approach.

I'd given my post a number of specific Technorati tags, including KB924867 (the hotfix MS has now issued). I noticed a Technorati search was run for http://technorati.com/tags/KB924867 yesterday morning — and there's only the one post tagged with KB924867. I don't know if this was how Guy found my post, but one reason I tagged it like this is because I know the KB917422 issue will have affected a lot of users out there — and this tag might be a way to spread the word that a hotfix has arrived. 

Whatever the route, Macmillan has got itself into my consciousness because Guy bothered to find and then comment on my post. And because he did that, I discovered that any student having a copy of the Macmillan English Dictionary has free access to the Macmillan English Dictionary Online. When a student next asks my advice about buying a dictionary, I'm likely to pass this news on to him, too. 

I really like Alex's idea of extending this much further: a company issuing a support tag for a product would get my attention if they picked up on my blog post (tagged with the support tag), commented there and acted to help. The come-to-me web, indeed.

Technorati tags: customer support, user experience, support tag, support tagging, tagging, Alex Barnett

SpiralFrog

My first thought when hearing of SpiralFrog? Same as Publishing 2.0:

You’ve got to pity the poor advertiser faced with figuring out how to allocate ad dollars across all these new media.

But I was also excited. Anything that appears to break the ridiculous status quo of the music industry is bound to set expectations going. However ... questions certainly remain.

BBC News reported:

'Vivendi Universal, the world's biggest music group, has signed a deal to make its music catalogue available on a free legal downloads service. Under the agreement, Spiralfrog will offer Universal's songs online in the US and Canada. New York-based Spiralfrog will launch its service in December and make its money by carrying adverts on the site. Spiralfrog aims to take on market leader Apple's iTunes service, which charges 99 cents per song in the US.'

And CNET:

The downloads could be played on the PC or transferred to a portable device, though notably not Apple Computer's iPod.

(The FT also has a piece.)

Nice to see Apple, iPod and iTunes under pressure, and it was easy to take Universal's move as heralding more of 'content … at no cost'. But there's cost and cost, and this does appear to cost — in DRM:

Spiral Frog will offer a desktop downloader for Windows Media Files (no iPods!) that can be listened to on one PC and two portable devices. Here’s the kicker - you must log in to the Spiral Frog service at least once per month, and see their ads, or your files will stop playing! The details aren’t fully set in stone, but it will be something like that. There will be links to third party sites of the record labels’ choosing if you’d like to buy your freedom to at least skip the ads. TechCrunch

I'm also wondering how SpiralFrog will deal with payment to artists, but more than anything else I can only second what TechCrunch says: 'It will be an exciting day if the major labels come up with something truly more compelling than piracy on one hand or coercion on the other - but I don’t think this is it'.

Technorati tags: music industry, downloading, DRM

IT versatility

The most sought-after corporate IT workers in 2010 may be those with no deep-seated technical skills at all. The nuts-and-bolts programming and easy-to-document support jobs will have all gone to third-party providers in the U.S. or abroad. Instead, IT departments will be populated with "versatilists" -- those with a technology background who also know the business sector inside and out, can architect and carry out IT plans that will add business value, and can cultivate relationships both inside and outside the company.

That's the general consensus of three research groups that have studied the IT workforce landscape for 2010 -- the year that marks the culmination of the decade of the versatile workforce. What's driving these changes? Several culprits include changes in consumer behavior, an increase in corporate mergers and acquisitions, outsourcing, the proliferation of mobile devices and growth in stored data.

What's more, the skills required to land these future technical roles will be honed outside of IT. Some of these skills will come from artistic talents, math excellence or even a knack for public speaking -- producing a combination of skills not commonly seen in the IT realm. …

"For my money, the hot jobs in 2010 will be these enabler jobs: business enterprise architects, business technologists, systems analysts and project managers," says David Foote, CEO and chief research officer of Foote Partners LLC, an IT management consultancy and workforce research firm in New Caanan, Conn. "If I were in IT, I would be in one of these jobs in the next five years. A lot of people can't because they're pure technologists. …"

Computerworld (via Ross Mayfield, del.icio.us)

Technorati tags: IT, versatilists

More on 3-into-1

via Skype Journal, this glimpse of the possible future, from the eBay Financial Analyst conference (4 May; pdf — pages 290 and 287, respectively):

Technorati tags: eBay, PayPal, Skype

Three into one: eBay, PayPal, Skype

As expected …

EBAY INTENDS TO INTEGRATE SKYPE into its auction service to further facilitate communication between buyers and sellers on the site, CEO Meg Whitman said at its Analyst Day late last week. The company also plans to use Skype to launch a pay-per-lead ad system to increase revenue on the site.

Describing the integration of PayPal and Skype with eBay as "the power of three," Whitman said that integrating Skype would help buyers connect with sellers in a simple and trusting fashion, one of eBay's chief missions. "PayPal created a simple yet incredibly powerful way to handle payments on the Web," she said. "Likewise, Skype found a whole new way to deploy voice technology to create the simplest online communications product in the world today."

MediaPost: Online Media Daily

Technorati tags: eBay, PayPal, Skype, advertising, eCommerce

Dan Gillmor: lessons from Bayosphere on Citizen Journalism

Dan Gillmor has a fine piece here about the Bayoshpere venture into citizen journalism. There's much to thank him for in the posting: for one thing, his clear outline of the business options they considered before settling on publishing is a useful list for anyone considering doing something similar.

Bayosphere didn't get airborne, and the best of Dan Gillmor's posting lies in the lessons he's drawn from the experience:

… Bayosphere attracted quite a bit of traffic, and some heartening effort on the part of some citizen journalists. I'm grateful to them for trying. But as is obvious to anyone who's paid attention, the site didn't take off -- in large part, no question about it, because of my own miscues and shortcomings. My friend Esther Dyson says, wisely, "Always make new mistakes." Did I ever. But I learned from them, and from what did work. Here are some of the lessons:

• Citizen journalism is, in a significant way, about owning your own words. That implies responsibilities as well as freedom. We asked people to read and agree to a "pledge" that briefly explained what we believed it meant to be a citizen journalist -- including principles such as thoroughness, fairness, accuracy and transparency. Although some cynics hooted that this was at best naive, we're convinced it was at least useful.
• Limiting participation is not necessarily a bad idea. By asking for a valid e-mail address simply in order to post comments, you reduce the pool of commenters considerably, but you increase the quality of the postings. And by asking for real names and contact information, as we did with the citizen journalists, you reduce the pool by several orders of magnitude. Again, however, there appears to be a correlation between willingness to stand behind one's own words and the overall quality of what's said.
• Citizen journalists need and deserve active collaboration and assistance. They want some direction and a framework, including a clear understanding of what the site's purpose is and what tasks are required. (I didn't do nearly a good enough job in this area.)
• A framework doesn't mean a rigid structure, where the citizen journalist is only doing rote work such as filling in boxes.
• The tools available today are interesting and surprisingly robust. But they remain largely aimed at people with serious technical skills -- which means too ornate and frequently incomprehensible to almost everyone else. Our tech expert, Jay Campbell, did a heroic job of trying to wrestle the software into submission to our goals. We still felt frustrated by the missing links.
• Tools matter, but they're no substitute for community building. (This is a special skill that I'm only beginning to understand even now.)
• Though not so much a lesson -- we were very clear on this going in -- it bears repeating that a business model can't say, "You do all the work and we'll take all the money, thank you very much." There must be clear incentives for participation, and genuine incentives require resources.
• On several occasions, PR people offered to brief me on upcoming products or events that they hoped I'd cover in my capacity as a tech journalist, but were happy to give the slot to our citizen journalists. This testifies to a growing recognition among more clued-in PR folks that citizen journalism is here to stay.
• Although the participants -- citizen journalists and commenters -- are essential, it's even more important to remember that publishing is about the audience in the end. Most people who come to the site are not participants. They're looking for the proverbial "clean, well-lighted place" where they can learn or be entertained, or both.
• If you don't already have a thick skin, grow one.

Marc (Canter) has some comments about this here (and see, too, Lloyd Shepherd's posting). As Marc says, 'How many failed CEOs would blog it - and explain what went wrong, their own shortcomings and deliver an honest apology?'.

No surprise, then, that I also take away from Dan Gillmor's posting respect for his honest self-appraisal: 'As an entrepreneur, let's just say I wasn't in my element. The relentless focus on a single, limited project for long periods of time, combined with the inevitable compromises inherent in for-profit decision-making, turned out not to be my best skills'. (A friend of his said, "Well, you've always struck me as more of a dot-org kind of guy than the dot-com kind".)

The experience hasn't shaken Dan Gillmor's faith in citizen journalism: 'As the Bayosphere project was playing out last fall, I concluded that I could do more for the citizen journalism movement by forming a nonprofit enterprise, a "Center for Citizen Media" where I could put my skills and passion for the genre to better use'. His concluding comments are full of hope:

The shift in how we communicate and collaborate, how we learn what's going on in our world, has barely begun. Predicting the future is for other people, but I'm optimistic that we'll collectively figure this out.

Technorati tags: citizen journalism, Bayosphere, start-ups, business models, Dan Gillmor

The next revolution in interactions

Dion Hinchcliffe on the recent McKinsey & Company article, 'The next revolution in interactions' (free registration required):

McKinsey sites "phenomonal growth" in jobs requiring complex transactions, almost 3 times higher than for transactional jobs and the general economy as a whole.  They also cite numerous other recent statistics to back up the point, and which are worth further study.  The most salient point for us to take away is that the biggest productivity gains remaining in the economy will come from removing transactional burdens from employees so they can engage in higher-value interaction activites.  I would observe that many of these interactions are the most widely enabled by Web 2.0 style techniques like harnessing collective intelligence, customer self-service, The Long Tail, and many of the others.

The actions recommended by McKinsey are a fascinating study in Web 2.0 style concepts for collaboration, participation, content exploitation, loosely-coupled connections between diverse IT systems across the board (a critically important topic which I wrote about recently in the SOA Web Services Journal), etc.

Posted via Performancing 1.1 (now with added TrackBack support, del.icio.us integration — and much more!)

Technorati tags: Long Tail, interactions, collective intelligence, participation, loosely coupled

Little boxes

John Naughton's column in today's Observer has an entertaining couple of final paragraphs about Apple's new TV ad and Intel's gobsmacked reaction:

'The Intel chip', it burbles. 'For years, it's been trapped inside PCs, inside dull little boxes …'

These preceding paragraphs are the meat, though:

The move to Intel processors takes Apple into uncharted territory. For the first time it will be possible - with a little bit of tweaking - to run Windows natively (without going through a software emulator) on a Mac. The prospect of so-called 'dual-boot' Apple computers - ones that can run both Microsoft and Apple operating systems - now seems real. This could be good news for people who run PCs, not because they love them but because an application essential for their business only runs under Windows.

It's more difficult to see what the upside of this would be for Apple. It might mean that it sells more computers and finally penetrates the corporate marketplace - hitherto a Windows-only zone. But the impact on Microsoft would be negligible, because people will still need Windows licences if they wish to run a dual-boot machine.

More troubling for Apple is the prospect that its operating system and applications software can now run natively on (much cheaper) PC hardware. The company is set against this, but already programmers have hacked it and it is difficult to see how Apple could stop the practice. If it catches on, Apple might see sales of its computers decline as those who admire Apple software but dislike its hardware prices get the best of both worlds.

Technorati tags: Windows, Microsoft, Intel, John Naughton

Intellectual Property: a Digital Rights Campaign

I'm grateful to James Governor for digging a bit further than me, visiting the National Consumer Council's website (as opposed to stopping with the BBC's report — see below). The NCC is dedicating time and energy to digital rights:

There is a new section to the website which summarises the NCC's work on innovation and intellectual property (IP). We argue that the view of consumers — as being at the end of the value chain, choosing from the products and services offered by providers — is outdated, and that this is reflected in IP law...

More information about the NCC's work on IP here:

Traditionally, businesses and policy-makers have tended to think of consumers as being at the end of the value chain, choosing from the range of products and services offered by providers. This does not describe how value is created in a modern economy and the role consumers can, and do, play in innovation and the co-creation of products and services.

This outdated view of the role of consumers is reflected in intellectual property (IP) law which gives rights to owners to control the use of innovations and ideas, and describes public and consumer fair access and use rights as exclusions and exceptions.

In addition, powerful business lobbies have been able to exert considerable influence on the development of IP law. This has increased the level of protection of IP rights and reduced public and consumer access and use rights.

This is not just bad for consumers, it is bad for society, as it constrains the ability of everyone to access important resources, and stifles the sorts of consumer creativity that can enhance economic growth.

The NCC has a page about the Digital Rights Campaign of the Bureau Européen des Unions de Consommateurs:

On 10 November 2005, BEUC, the European Consumer Organisation, launched a campaign for consumer rights in the digital environments calling for the following rights to be enshrined in EU law:

• the right to choice, knowledge and cultural diversity
  
• the right to the principle of 'technical neutrality' — defend and maintain consumer rights to the digital environment
  
• the right to benefit from technological innovations without abusive restrictions
  
• the right to interoperability of content and devices
  
• the right to the protection of privacy
  
• the right not to be criminalised

In addition, the declaration calls for:

• industry to desist from legal action against P2P downloaders to allow the market to find solutions for the on-line development of audio/visual distribution
• action to ensure that DRM users respect consumer privacy and fair use rights

The set of six bulleted points constitutes the BEUC's proposed Consumers' Digital Rights.

James quotes the BEUC's position statement:

BEUC believes that the European publishing sector is crucial to the building of a knowledge-based economy. However, blindly ‘enhancing’, ‘supporting’ and ‘extending’ the copyright protection regime may confer unjustified monopoly privileges, impede competition, potentially impose unfair costs on consumers and risk to inhibit creativity. Do we want a society in which the free exchange of ideas - on which our society thrives - remains possible or do we want access to content curtailed by excessive copyright regulation and abusive use of DRMs? The report correctly states about copyright and DRMs that “widespread acceptance by consumers is still lacking”. The reason for this is (at least) twofold: Firstly, DRMs are restricting consumers legitimate use of copyrighted (and non-copyrighted) material. According to the Commission, publishers also regard DRM as a technology with increased control over content and more precise definitions of the rights associated to the assets they commercialise. These “rights” go beyond what is asserted by intellectual property law and we deplore the lack of discussion on potential adverse effects on consumers, and the eventual need to guarantee consumers rights in relation to the works they legally purchase.

He also found their online petition. To echo James: please go sign it.

As the BEUC puts it elsewhere (1/ here and 2/ here) on their website:

1/
Under the heading of Digital Rights Management (DRM) new technologies are being used to limit or prohibit perfectly legitimate practices. “Exemplary" legal cases are being prosecuted and users threatened with huge penalties for downloading music or films on the Internet. The industry hides behind the artists that it claims to defend, alienating their fans and supporters. We know that there is a serious global problem of piracy. Consumers should not buy counterfeit copies of CDs and DVDs; too often these products are made in large numbers by organised criminal, and probably also terrorist, gangs. On the other hand, private consumers are not criminals or terrorists and the industry must stop portraying them as such. The time has come to guarantee consumers certain basic rights in the digital world, and to tell them what they can do with their digital hardware/content. This is our message in this campaign.

2/
We urge policy makers to endorse the 6 Consumers Digital Rights, and demand:

• A legal framework that will encourage new means of exposure and distribution of digital content, while guaranteeing remuneration to artists, creators and performers and providing consumers and the public with new means of access, discovery and new uses;

• A new balance between exclusive rights in the exploitation of digital content and public interest objectives in using and sharing such content, taking into account the new possibilities of content usage enabled by technical progress;

• That industry desist from legal action against P2P downloaders to allow the market to find solutions for the on-line development of audio/visual distribution that takes due account of the public interest and the interest of artists, creators and performers;

• Action to find solutions on how consumers can effectively exercise their private use rights and to guarantee that users of DRMs respect the legitimate interest of consumers in their personal autonomy and private sphere;

• Mechanisms to ensure that TPMs or DRMs, which restrict uses legally exempted from copyright or not falling under copyright, do not benefit from legal protection;

• A review of the EU legal framework on consumer protection and intellectual property in view of the 6 consumers rights demands expressed in this Declaration.

Technorati tags: NCC, BEUC, IP, innovation, DRM, Copy Rights

DRM rumbles

Plenty of reverberations set off by Lloyd's post which I wrote about yesterday. The comments to his blog took off and there's a lot there worth reading. Lloyd's post began:

I just had lunch with someone who works for a broadcaster and is wrestling with the idea of distributing content online and we both agreed that what’s missing from the whole DRM debate is a strong case for “just enough DRM".

One of the comments I found most interesting was Tom Loosemore's:

I am the ’some[one] from a broadcaster’ to whom Lloyd refers above. I’m afraid I didn’t come away with the same conclusion wrt our DRM conversation. For me DRM remains a suite of technologies delivering negative consumer value, and as such I can only view it as a a short-term irritant.

In the long term, the near-magical ability of digital tech to make and share perfect copies at near-zero marginal cost will be embraced by successful media businesses - businesses which with probably employ wholly new business models. That said, those new business models are looking decidedly thin on the ground right now. Thus, many rights holders are acting logically in demanding their content is locked up by DRM, as is perceived to be required to support current business models.

This ‘use DRM or nothing goes online’ reality leaves me with a quandary:

1) I could retire to the sidelines and wave ‘DRM is Evil’ placards. Some people I respect hugely have taken this option.

2) Or I could conclude that it is my employer’s best interests to ensure we use the least-bad DRM solution as a necessary evil. That way we’ve at least got a stake in what will be a very messy game, and millions of people will be able to enjoy online access to content which would otherwise not be available to them.

So I would restate Lloyd’s question thus:

If you’ve got to use DRM as a precondition to allowing access to content online, what’s the least-bad flavour?

The hardest questions are often the ones you hate being asked.

BTW, I say that if you still answer ‘none’ to the above, I say you’re copping out of the debate. After all, placard-waving is much easier if you can still access stuff via darknets. Most people can’t or won’t, so in effect you’re denying the majority of people any online access to content which you remain free to enjoy. …

In his second comment to Lloyd's post, Lee says :

… a debate is needed for sure. … The almost total lack of consumer knowledge about the DRM debate (ORG: where are you by the way?) is why we must not trot out classical economic fallacies like ‘the market will decide’ or ‘consumers seem happy with it’. … On the one hand, we need a reasoned debate to involve the public in the story. On the other, those trying to fight DRM in its totality need to get their act together and think about how to bring about systemic change … Maybe part of the answer lies in not calling the least-bad implementations DRM, so we can differentiate between attempts to create mechanisms that open up new distribution channels and deliver value, and Hollywood’s drive to squeeze every last drop of profit out of an unsustainable business model and retain their position of economic power and cultural hegemony.

Doc Searls blogged about Lloyd's posting here. Shelley's posting, Debate on DRM, has some of the best quality comments I've seen in a while.

Required reading is Kevin Marks' 5 short arguments against DRM; his latest on DRM is here.

The UK Parliament's All Party Internet Group has a page dedicated to its Inquiry into Digital Rights Management. David Weinberger's submission to the latter, 'Fair but Wrong', is here and his short essay, 'Copy Protection is a Crime', is here.

In an update to his post, Lloyd notes:

… no-one - and I mean no-one - responded to the main question: is there an application of DRM (or at least something that looks like DRM) out there which actually works (and the implication in there, if you didn’t get it, was that every time I’ve encountered it it does not, OK?). The only sites referred to were emusic (which doesn’t use DRM at all), AllOfMP3 (which, as far as I’m aware, doesn’t send royalties to artists) and Wippit (which I believe does use DRM, just not everywhere, or at least with a light touch). It would appear that the answer to my original question is a resounding “no” from this little survey.

Technorati tags: DRM, copyfight, ORG

What DRM argument?

I enjoy both of Lloyd Shepherd's blogs. His work blog, given that he is Deputy Director of Digital Publishing at Guardian Unlimited, helps me see into the world of commercial publishing and follow the developments at his paper. His most recent post calls on Chris Anderson's question, 'how much DRM is too much?'. He goes on to say:

… let’s face it: we’re going to have to have some DRM. At some level, there has to be an appropriate level of control over content to make it economically feasible for people to produce it at anything like an industrial level. And on the other side of things, it’s clear that the people who make the consumer technology that ordinary people actually use - the Microsoft's and Apples of the world - have already accepted and embraced this. The argument has already moved on.

Hang on a moment! Who's had this argument? Did I blink and miss the great national and international debates? Lloyd asks:

… what are the best implementations of DRM out there, which balance the needs of the provider and the consumer without getting in the way of either? Does such a thing exist?

Ah, if only these kinds of questions were being asked by the DRM-generating industries in frank and open discussion with their customers and artists! That there have been more narrowly conceived commercial decisions and that these arguments have 'moved on' is evident almost everywhere one looks, and, as Lloyd acknowledges fulsomely, copyfighters and those who have a vision for the net (as something other than just another 'content distribution system') have been shouting about developments for a long while now. Here, DRM is of great concern, but it's the very nature of the net that is at the heart of the matter. Some recent examples … Julian Bond (yesterday, writing about Google's plan to open an online video store):

The fly in this ointment is indeed DRM. … Amazon, AOL, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Real and now Google have all jumped the fence and landed on the other side as content intermediaries no different from the old media businesses. So now they're part of the problem not a potential solution. And sitting in the middle of all this is Intel whose close ties with all these players mean that they're more than happy to build in the hardware controls to support it.

Doc Searls (November, '05):

All the big boys: the PC makers, the chip makers, the mobile equipment providers, the "consumer experience" deliverers (including Virgin, its many holdings and the rest of the entertainment industry), the patent, copyright and IP (Intellectual Property) absolutists, the parochial national interests, and — most of all — the carriers by the grace of whose fiber and wiring the Net is made available — all want to control you: what you can do with their services and devices, what you can buy, who you can buy it from, and how you can use it. The free and open Internet, a World of Ends built on an end-to-end, peer-to-peer architecture, is slowly being privatized and nationalized, one DRM file, one blocked port, one platform silo, one walled data garden, one legislative action, one regulatory decree, one Supreme Court decision and one national cyberwall after another.

This is what we are fighting, folks. The open and free marketplace the Internet provides is shortly going to look like the best darn mess of few-to-many distribution systems for "content" the world has ever known. It will not be the free and open marketplace it was in the first place, and should remain. The end-state will [be] a vast matrix of national and private silos and walled gardens, each a contained or filtered distribution environment. And most of us won't know what we missed, because it never quite happened.

Rafael Behr, editor, Observer online, concluding his article 'Access Denied' (Observer, September, '05):

Not everyone is pessimistic. In fact, a lot of long-term web users are utopian about the future. All the hyperbole that was first draped around the web has proved inadequate. In the way it transforms and accelerates the communication of ideas between individuals and societies, it is about as big as the invention of the alphabet. And it is free. But for how long? The machinery of government and big business is only just beginning to understand the scale of the web. The culture of common purpose that prevails today is a product of neglect as much as design. The real gold rush has barely begun. To experience the sharing culture of the blogosphere today is like living in a commune built on an oil field. One day, the diggers will move in.

Ours is the last generation that will remember the analogue world and feel the difference between the two realms. For the next generation of digital natives, the web will be a slick, commercial machine. It will be just as big as the world we currently live in and it will be just as ruthless and as corrupt.

I hope I am wrong. I listen to today's web gurus, the people who preach freedom, and am fired with enthusiasm for the new digital society of the future. But I fear the odds are against them. An excess of idealism only seems to prove that the golden age of the web is, in fact, right now.

And, finally, David Weinberger at the OII last November: 'This could be the bright, shiny period of the internet, of openness'.

What's missing is precisely the public debate — about DRM, about the net. (See Lee's comment to Lloyd's post: 'People don’t actually know much about DRM and therefore cannot be expected to make a reasoned judgement about its side effects'.) ORG has been created to help address this here in the UK (further links via this posting), but the challenge ahead is huge.

Meantime, DRM is developing apace and the latest news I've come across concerning it again justifies the kinds of concerns being voiced — David Berlind (writing two days ago):

I've been warning about the unprecedented levarage that the DRM patent holders will be able to apply to content distribution channels such as the telecommunication networks. Having multiple incompatible DRM schemes out there is bad enough.  All these devices that are incompatible with each other (some from the same manufacturer like Motorola)? Being forced to match devices to content sources on the basis of DRM compatibility?  It's ridiculous.  But disabling MP3? If it's true, this crosses the line …

I don't know the answers to the questions Lloyd poses, but I know what I value in the net and I know that DRM absurdities (some choice ones from the walled garden of iTunes/iPod) are undermining the very customer bases they were created to protect. In that self-inflicted damage, there lies some hope, at least.

Technorati tags: DRM, copyfight, ORG

Online music

CrunchNotes:

I’m sticking to my prediction that music will have to be free and un-DRM’d at some point. There is just no other way. Labels and artists will need to make money from certified-quality downloads, limited edition merchandise, tours, etc. Bands and managers will make a lot more money. Labels will mostly go out of business. And while this debate and courtroom drama continues, Russia-based, pay-by-the-megabyte allofmp3.com is changing the game permanently. The RIAA either needs to go nuclear on them (if they can) or change their own business models for good, because they can’t just continue to pretend they don’t exist.

Agreed, on all counts.

(This post was made, by way of experiment, with Performancing.)

Plus:

1. If you haven't seen it already, go read David Berlind's post of today, Why your music collections will bite the DRM dust.
2. I've written about allofmp3.com before: here and here.

Building a better web

I've said this before, but, egad, why the hell are we discouraging people who are building tools - good or bad, useful or useless, on the right track or off base - because everything that is happening right now is necessary to build a better web. horsepigcow

I met Tara at the Scoble/MacLeod dinner. Her energy and enthusiasm are palpable and I'm happy to say I think she's absolutely right to make this point. For reasons that she may, or may not, support, I'm with the Web 2.0 guys because as Stowe Boyd says, 'there is a new sensibility about web applications -- how they are conceived, designed, built, marketed and sold -- that in aggregate is truly different (from) what preceded it'.

And then there's this from Grant McCracken, discussing three, no four models of Internet 2.0 (the first three being disintermediation, long tail, reformation). He's talking about 'doing research in Korea.  Teens and college students were creating new networks with webpages (the local equivalent of MySpace) and and the clouds of photos and messages they were sending one another.  I assumed that this was Model 2 stuff, a change in fundamentals of interaction, until they began to talk about themselves in new ways'.

It became clear eventually that these people were reforming personhood and the self.  The self was not merely better connected, but now more porous, more distributed, more cloud like.  This cultural fundamental, the definition of what and who a person is, was changing. … The reformation model says fundamental categories of our culture (particularly the self and the group and the terms with which we think about them) are changing.  …  This is a change in the basic terms of reference, the very  internal blue print with which we understand and construct the world.

Model four:  continuous presence (everything and everyone all the time)

One way to assess innovations is to make a guess about where we are headed.  I think our economic, social and cultural destination might be this: we will be continuously connected to all knowledge and all people with a minimum of friction, and privilege will be measured, in part, by how good are the filters with which we make contact with all but only the people and knowledge we care about.

As the comments to Grant's posting say, the role of the intermediaries, the filters, is crucial, for the alternative is information overload. (There are some other important points made there that need to be pondered.) Of course, blogs now act as filters.

Knowledge workers

At Google, we think business guru Peter Drucker well understood how to manage the new breed of "knowledge workers." After all, Drucker invented the term in 1959. He says knowledge workers believe they are paid to be effective, not to work 9 to 5, and that smart businesses will "strip away everything that gets in their knowledge workers' way." Those that succeed will attract the best performers, securing "the single biggest factor for competitive advantage in the next 25 years." Newsweek

This is from an article on Google's Ten Golden Rules. I don't like the sound of 'Hire by committee', but maybe this bullet point loses something in translation. The spiel beneath it runs, 'If you hire great people and involve them intensively in the hiring process, you'll get more great people' — and that I do warm to. ('Strive to reach a consensus' also sounds … dull, but read the words beneath the header and what we're perhaps talking about is building common purpose, a shared vision … I think … 'At Google, the role of the manager is that of an aggregator of viewpoints, not the dictator of decisions': err …  yes, and no.) Other points that stand out for me: make coordination easy; eat your own dog food; encourage creativity; communicate effectively.

I want to read some Drucker:

"What motivates workers - especially knowledge workers - is what motivates volunteers. Volunteers, we know, have to get more satisfaction from their work than paid employees precisely because they do not get a pay check. They need, above all, challenge. They need to know the organization's mission and to believe in it. They need continuous training. They need to see results. Implicit in this is that employees have to be managed as associates, partners-and not in name only. The definition of a partnership is that all partners are equal."

"The productivity of the knowledge worker is still abysmally low. It has probably not improved in the past 100 or even 200 years-for the simple reason that nobody has worked at improving the productivity. All our work on productivity has been on the productivity of the manual worker…The way one maximizes their performance is by capitalizing on their strengths and their knowledge rather than trying to force them into molds."

(Quotations from the NHS National Electronic Library for Health — now that's interesting!)

There's clearly a lot to be learned from him and I am ashamed to think how I have managed many adults in the course of my work in education and yet, like most of my peers, never received anything but the most cursory induction into "management training":

In the amount and kind of formal knowledge required, knowledge work will differ tremendously. Some will have fairly low requirements, some will require the kind of knowledge the neurosurgeon has to possess. Even if the knowledge itself is quite primitive, it is knowledge that only formal education can provide. Filing is hardly advanced knowledge work. However, it is based on a knowledge of the alphabet or in Japan on a knowledge of Chinese ideographs which can be acquired only in and through systematic learning, that is, in and through formal schooling.

The first implication of this is that education will become the center of the knowledge society and schooling its key institution. What knowledge mix is required for everyone? What is quality in learning and teaching? All these will, of necessity, become central concerns of the knowledge society and central political issues. In fact, it may not be too fanciful to anticipate that the acquisition and distribution of formal knowledge will come to occupy the place in the politics of the knowledge society which acquisition and distribution of property and income have occupied in the two or three centuries which we have come to call the Age of Capitalism.

Paradoxically, this may not necessarily mean that the school as we know it will become more important. For, in the knowledge society, clearly more and more of knowledge, and especially of advanced knowledge, will be acquired well past the age of formal schooling, and increasingly, perhaps, in and through educational processes which do not center on the traditional school, e.g. systematic continuing education offered at the place of employment. But, at the same time, there is very little doubt that the performance of the schools and the basic values of the schools will increasingly become of concern to society as a whole, rather than be considered professional matters that can be left to the educator.

We can also predict with high probability that we will redefine what it means to be an educated person. Traditionally and especially during the last two hundred years at least in the West (and since about that time in Japan as well) an educated person was someone who shared a common stock of formal knowledge what the Germans called Allgemeine Bildung and the English ( and following them, the nineteenth- century Americans) called the liberal arts. Increasingly, an educated person, will be someone who has learned how to learn, and throughout his or her lifetime continues to learn, especially in and out of formal education. …

This society, in which knowledge workers dominate, is in danger of a new class conflict: the conflict between the large minority of knowledge workers and the majority of people who will make their living through traditional ways, either by manual work, whether skilled or unskilled, or by services work, whether skilled or unskilled. The productivity of knowledge work still abysmally low will predictably become the economic challenge of the knowledge society. On it will depend the competitive position of every country, industry and institution within society. The productivity of the non- knowledge services worker will increasingly become the social challenge to the knowledge society. On it will depend the ability of the knowledge society to give decent incomes and with them dignity and status to non-knowledge people.

No earlier society in history faced these challenges.

Equally new are the opportunities of the knowledge society. In the knowledge society, for the first time in history, access to leadership is open to all.

Equally, access to the acquisition of knowledge will no longer be dependent on obtaining a prescribed education at any given age. Learning will become the tool of the individual available to him or her at any age if only because so much of skill and knowledge can be acquired by means of the new learning technologies. …

Given what passes for "management training" in teaching, our lack of exposure to it is probably a very, very good thing. But I am beginning to realise what could be delivered under this tag.

There is a wealth of material, of ideas in Peter Drucker's 1994 Edwin L. Godkin Lecture — far too many to summarise here. This remark struck home for me, but will be elusive plucked from its context (so, again, read the original!): 'the shift from knowledge to knowledges offers tremendous opportunities to the individual. It makes possible a career as a knowledge worker'.

Footnote (that really is no such thing): management is knowledge work. Furthermore (and many times so): 'just as the essence of medicine is not the urine analysis, the essence of management is not technique or procedure. The essence of management is to make knowledges productive. Management, in other words, is a social function. And, in its practice, management is truly a liberal art' — Drucker.

The Live Web

A great Doc Searls post:

Here's the biggest fact about the live Web: individuals are in charge. The group we used to call consumers are now producers. The demand side is supplying itself. Dealing with that fact, and taking advantage of it, is the biggest challenge and opportunity for everybody who wants to succeed in the live Web.

Think about photography for a minute. Used to be we consumed film and processing and showed prints to a few friends and family members before they went in drawers or albums on shelves in our homes. Now we produce our own photography, publish it on Flickr or BuzzNet, tag it and share it with thousands or millions of people, in a form where it is interesting and useful and completely drives the whole photography business, far more, in the long run, than any brand, even Kodak, ever did.

So there is a new balance of power in the world, that we're seeing first in the live Web. Now individuals are in charge of their own lives, their own livings, and the things they do in the world, many of which involve production of goods like we've never seen before.

I'd like to quote it all, but that would be … indecorous. Go read it!

Wi-Fi for all

BBC News:

Wireless Philadelphia is a project that has been in development for several years, but which will not be finished until late 2006. It seems such an agreeable proposition to everybody involved - cheap wi-fi for an entire city. "A citizen will pay a base fee of $10 or $20 depending upon their income status, for access to the network," explained the city's chief information officer, Dianah Neff. …

When Dianah Neff announced the project she faced an immediate legal and lobbying onslaught from the giant telecommunications companies, led by Verizon. It was alarmed that the government of America's fifth largest city was getting involved in wi-fi at all, and that the fees would be a fraction of the cost of a private fast internet connection, typically around $45-60 per month when bundled with a mandatory landline telephone service. …

Verizon lost its fight in Philadelphia but has succeeded in getting the law changed in the rest of the state. Essentially it has become almost impossible for any other community to set up its own wi-fi system. Several other states have also enacted similar bans, often supported by local politicians who have connections to telecommunications corporations.

However Philadelphia says that too many low income families cannot afford high broadband prices and the service is needed to shrink the digital divide between rich and poor. The city now sees internet access as an essential service just like street lighting and sanitation.  …

Andrew Rasiej didn't get elected in New York, but he had the right idea on this one: Wi-Fi networking cities must be the way to go and it must be seen as 'an essential service just like street lighting and sanitation' — and be priced and rolled out accordingly with the fullest engagement of civic authorities.