Preoccupations

Edging the enterprise forward

Thinking about schools, enterprises and intranets, I wanted to jot down here some things I've been reading in the last few days that make a lot of sense to me.

Headshift (1):

I am sure organisations will eventually be able to create, within their online spaces, the sort of interaction, collaboration and sharing that takes place in the "wild world" of the Internet. Until then, we just have to help them make the most of the tools they have (or get) and provide them ideas on how to, slowly, start rethinking their internal processes, culture and view of the world. 

That is one of the reasons developing the system is just one of the steps in the work we do. Engagement is the other big one.

Headshift (2 — Lee, 'Last week, a group of us at Headshift spent a day at the Blogging 4 Business 2007 conference'): 

In addition to the tools, success is also about: 

1. concrete business use cases
2. engagement & people support
3. a connected infrastructure

This is why we focus primarily on use cases, and the mapping between a task and information analysis of these use cases and the behavioural characteristics of the tools, in order to find the right blend of social modes in each project we undertake. During the session, we announced that we are about to open source the use case library that we use internally to capture these examples, so hopefully this will help others get to grips with the many practical applications that currently exist for enterprise social tools.

Blogging 4 Business (via Lee's post and covering the same conference): 

Got to applaud Bryant for saying all this technology is really all about the people at the end of the keyboard. "With social tools, you get immediate payback because you use lightweight tools to organise information in a way that means something to you." Example - social tagging (picking your own keywords to identify and structure the information you post, not having to adhere to a hierarchy picked by those know-nothings in the IT department).

Representative of BT asks if all this new stuff means "the end of internal communications" as we know it (and I feel fine). Paraphrasing Lee Bryant: "Every generation of technologists see themselves as Luke Skywalker zooming in to destroy the Evil Empire" - but it's more about "layers".

Mike Butcher asks how the existing knowledge in company intranets can be adapted to new wikis. Fitch says we'll all move to "using the web to create communities of collaboration" - from a situation where companies have relied on static intranets for the last eight years.

Bryant says out-of-date material will simply naturally "fade in to the background".

Perfect Path (again, same conference): 

Q: MB: Lots of companies have huge intranets - should we just wipe them away?
DF: very familiar with this - there’s a huge wealth of material that’s useful but just couldn’t be found - so we did some work about improving search and findability but also looking at using lighter infrastructure to start again, which will involve some pain, people will have to go back and look at relevance for example, but that change is going to deliver the benefit that we’re moving towards creating communities and connecting people rather than just producing static content. 

Q: GC: How do you deal with info that becomes out of date?
A:LB: different approaches - the most interesting is that in a mature implementation anything acquires its own context, tags etc so out of date stuff falls down as sediment in these systems. So then you need some sort of review system, but it’s more about letting more timely stuff come to the fore.
DF: it’s also so much easier to keep your stuff up to date, even for lawyers , so just using lighter tools helps a lot.

Many things link to/flow from all this, but there's a core here — about people, concrete use cases and change-through-engagement — that I wanted to highlight and remember. 

And, to round off on the intranet theme, this from Read/WriteWeb: 

Finally I mentioned intranets - and how ContentExchange will integrate or complement them. Mark [Suster, Koral founder/CEO and now in charge of Salesforce ContentExchange] quoted me a stat from Forrester that only 44% of people can find what they want on a corporate intranet, whereas 87% can find what they want on the Internet. So ContentExchange will help raise that 44% figure, says Mark.

Technorati tags: intranets, Headshift, enterprise, enterprise 2.0

'Top down politics is no longer sustainable in a bottom-up age'

Thought-provoking and rather more valuable than the thing I just read — George Osborne's talk at the RSA last week, 'Recasting the political settlement for the digital age'. Paul Miller drew my attention to it with his post:

Normally, listening to politicians talking about technology is a bit embarrassing. They fall into lots of very obvious traps and sound very naive. But the shadow chancellor has met the people, read the books and obviously spends a fair amount of time online (using Firefox which earned him extra brownie points).

The speech begins:

We are all here this morning because we share a common belief: we believe in the power of technology - in its ability to help transform society for the better by giving individuals more freedom, more choice and ultimately more power. At heart we are technology optimists. Of course technological change isn't always easy to deal with because it so often disrupts the established way of doing things. … Last November, in a talk on politics in the internet age, I identified some of the key social changes that have been unleashed by this technological revolution. Today I want to go further …

You can read the speech in full here. It describes 'three pillars on which I believe this new political settlement should be built':

• 'The first of these pillars is about equality - equality of information - or what Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive of Google, called "the democratisation of access to information" when he spoke to our Party Conference. For centuries access to the world's information - and the ability to communicate it - was controlled by a few: the powerful, the wealthy and the well educated. … No longer is there an asymmetry of information between the individual and the State, or between the layperson and the expert. This shift is changing the world. It is empowering individuals; raising expectations of government services; and increasing accountability for all of us who work in the public sector and in politics. …
• The second pillar of a new political settlement will be founded on new social networks. … On-line political networks are springing up in the UK too now - and interestingly they are almost all Conservative ones. There are those networks actively set up by the Conservative Party. … But it is not the official Conservative websites that I find most exciting. It is the unofficial ones. Take Conservativehome.com. … Although I, and other Shadow Cabinet members, am frequently the target of Conservativehome.com, it is for me unambiguously a good thing that it exists. … Top down politics is no longer sustainable in a bottom-up age. … 
• The final pillar of this new political settlement is open source. … Open source politics means rejecting the old monolithic top-down approach to decision-making. It means throwing open the doors and listening to new ideas and new contributors. It means harnessing the power of mass collaboration. And rather than relying on the input of a few trusted experts, it means drawing on the skills and expertise of millions. … Companies are now increasingly using "Wikis" to solve internal problems - because you can have lots of people working on them at once. Those people don't necessarily have to work for the company. This is a radical departure from our traditional understanding of the business model. … Similar collaborative approaches could be applied in government. … The direction of travel is clear. The government needs to get onboard. … Another way the government could harness an open source approach is through the procurement of open source software. … Ever since I visited the headquarters of Mozilla in Palo Alto I have become a user of their open source Firefox web-browser. … most central governments departments make use of no open source software whatsoever. What's going wrong? The problem is that the cultural change has not taken place in government. … Not a single open source company is included in Catalyst, the government's list of approved IT suppliers. … Another problem has been the lack of open standards in government IT procurement. All too often, a government IT system is incompatible with other types of software, which stifles competition and hampers innovation. Looking at the litany of IT projects that have collapsed or spiralled over budget, it's clear too that this has meant billions of pounds wasted and public service reform being hampered. The government's entire approach needs to be overhauled.'

Striking in itself — a speech about the changed and still changing world in which politicians now work, the challenges, the ways forward — every educator should be reading it:

… the internet is like the child pushing at boundaries of authority and challenging the established way of doing things - the business models from the last century, traditional media, long accepted notions of national jurisdiction and concepts of governmental control. The challenge is for the "pushed" - probably most of us here in this room - to resist the urge to push back: to regulate and legislate; to try to tame and to control.

… the most basic reaction to new technology: doing the old thing a new way. Instead … successful companies are harnessing this new technology to do things in a new way …

What's needed in government is as much a cultural shift as a technological change. A shift to a culture that welcomes criticism and comment - then reacts to it. A shift to a culture that seeks customers' views and ideas at every stage of developing a service. And a shift to a culture where every service can be improved, and no service is ever fully developed. That means more than constantly tinkering with public services for the sake of it. It means being open to fresh thinking and input from both users and deliverers.

How are we, educators and schools, adapting and changing to life in this world?  How are we preparing our students for this world where technology has rendered knowledge abundant; where innovation, creativity, entrepreneurial flair and initiative are prized skills and qualities; where teenagers are collaborating and networking and hacking yet little or none of this is informing and transforming the formal curriculum? (For an index of numerous previous posts to do with education, click here.) The direction of travel is, indeed, clear and schools, too, need to get onboard.

Technorati tags: George Osborne, RSA, open source, schools, digital immigrants, digital natives

Jeff Jarvis on tagging

Well, I've had a geeky good time with the subject of tags. But this isn't just another valentine to just another cool online trend; we're so over that. No, tags have a larger lesson to teach to media. They present a clear demonstration that the web is not about flat content. The web is about connections and the value that arises from them if you enable people to collect and communicate. In the old, big, centralised, controlled world of media, a few people with a few tools - pencils, presses and Dewey decimals - thought they could organise the world and its content. But as it turns out, left to its own devices, the world is often better at organising itself. Jeff Jarvis, Media Guardian

Technorati tags: tags, tagging

Uncoordinated acts

Seth Godin writes about 'A great phrase coined by Glenn Reynolds': Horizontal Knowledge.

If we had started planning in 1993, we probably wouldn't have gotten here by now. The Web, Wi-Fi, and Google didn't develop and spread because somebody at the Bureau of Central Knowledge Planning planned them. They developed, in large part, from the uncoordinated activities of individuals. … We didn't need a thousand librarians with scanners, because we had a billion non-librarians with computers and divergent interests. … what lots of smart people, loosely coordinating their actions with each other, are capable of accomplishing. It's the power of horizontal, as opposed to vertical knowledge. … As the world grows more interconnected, more and more people have access to knowledge and coordination. Yet we continue to underestimate the revolutionary potential of this simple fact. Heck, we underestimate the revolutionary reality of it, in the form of things we already take for granted, like Wi-Fi and Google. But I'm not a wild-eyed visionary. As a result, I'm going to make a very conservative prediction: that the next ten years will see revolutions that make Wi-Fi and Google look tame, and that in short order we'll take those for granted, too. It's a safe bet. Glenn Reynolds

Seth Godin continues:

It's best understood by thinking about its opposite: Vertical Knowledge. The stuff you get from the boss or the MSM or the person at the front of the room. Whenever I go to a conference, I learn more from the people in the lobby. And the web is one big big lobby. … Planning implies vertical, top down thinking. And in many areas, it's backfiring.

There's a lot rolling around in my head that says this kind of thing, too, and in education I have never let go of that remark I read years ago, 'regimentation and education are incompatible'. Let things shoot, grow up and develop. Be very careful with, be very wary of the top down.

Silicon Valley comes to Oxford

To the Saïd Business School last night, to catch the evening panel discussion of this year's Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford, the fourth in the Saïd's annual series. These events bring together entrepreneurs, VCs and others involved in Silicon Valley, and this year the theme was 'Networks in the 21^st Century'. Line-up: Allen Morgan (Keynote; MD, Mayfield), Charlie Leadbeater (Chair), Reid Hoffman (CEO and Founder, LinkedIn; on the Board of SixApart, investor in Last.fm), Craig Newmark (Chairman and Founder, Craigslist), Christopher Sacca (Principal, New Business Development, Google), Maria Sendra (Partner, Baker & McKenzie), Evan Williams (Co-creator of Blogger and Co-founder and CEO of Odeo), Robert Young (Co-founder and formerly CEO & Chairman of Red Hat; Founder and CEO Lulu).

Inspiring evening, not least because of Charlie Leadbeater's (CL) clever, skillful chairing and incisive remarks. Some rough notes follow.

CL began by rehearsing the history of Wikipedia: in just 4½ years it has established a web presence whose daily net traffic now exceeds that of the NYT, yet it has just one employee, hired in January of this year. This will be familiar to many, but the impact on the audience of businessmen last night struck me — "Hey! A new business model!". The leveraging of the power of the many, of the enthusiastic, in a shared enterprise with a marked social and intellectual idealism. (Allen Morgan had already mentioned, amongst others, del.icio.us and Flickr; Reid Hoffman praised Last.fm.)

The 1½ hours of panel discussion sustained a very high level of enthusiasm for what is happening through collaborative activities on the web (of which Wikipedia is an extraordinary example, of course). Craig Newmark wasn't less idealistic for expressing himself in homelier ways: social networking is 'just getting people together to improve their lives'; coffee houses are often the new (old! — Ben Hammersley's talk at Reboot 7) centres for such collaboration. Bob Young didn't see collaborative, social networking as a new phase in the history of capitalism: it's something that has always been present but obscured historically by an emphasis on private property rights. CL: surely Open Source is something new, the emergence of a new kind of collaboratively driven culture of innovation?

Chris Sacca: Google operates with no business plan but with ideals — ideals are resilient, much less likely to lead to rigidity than plans and likelier to resist going out of date; go to Wikipedia and look at the number of inspiring Open Source-derived Manifestos. Evan Williams spoke warmly of the social idealism that the democratisation of networks, media (etc) is bringing about.

From the audience: Mike Butcher asked if more value isn't being destroyed than created through disintermediation. (He also points out the really surprising lack of WiFi at the Saïd — something John Naughton mocked back in September:

When I arrived, I asked the pleasant young woman at the desk how to log onto the wireless network. She gave me a nice-but-puzzled look. Her voice said that there wasn’t such a thing; her look said “This is a business school, dumbo, not some technology college”. So I launched MacStumbler and — Lo! — it was So! The University of Oxford’s Business School doesn’t have a single wireless network.)

Chris Sacca (to no-one's surprise): Google is enabling many more new markets than it's "helping" to close. Long Tail and all that. Others on the panel spoke up for this.

CL's message was loud and clear — the times are changing. Examples and predictions: BT now has 20,000 engineers who are self-scheduling as they are better at organising their own time than is any centralised service; after the first London July bombing of this year, within 24 hours the BBC had received 20,000 emails with news, 360 still photos and 4 pieces of video (I think I caught these stats correctly); education will change fundamentally in this kind of new world.

CL: what's happening on and through the web doesn't match the standard models. It's not pyramidal, it's not valley chain … A 'bird's nest' is the best image/model for something like Wikipedia.

And, in a reference to the idea a number of the panel had supported, that online social networking is "just" there to assist in and feed back into offline social networking, CL made it clear that he thinks some things are now happening online that simply could not happen before: for example, what's achievable through ease of online scaling. (I would add: and what happens when digital and real worlds converge and become one?)

Footnote: as the panel session closed, I realised what question I'd have liked to have asked. It's what Anil Dash raised recently and Caterina Fake and others have taken up (Matthew Gertner, Thomas Hawk, Jason, Robert, Mike; BusinessWeek): if the end-users are doing the leveraging, and adding much/most of the value, will there come a point where it's perceived that the most interesting/committed/best contributing end-users should get paid for what they're doing? Or is love enough? My take: I hope the idealism continues, along with the normal stuff of human social life which requires no monetary incentive — or shouldn't do. The attention (keyword!) that good photos on Flickr (etc) receive should be "payment" enough.

Challenges for pupils … and teachers

Barb writes:

Answers that used to be difficult to find were disseminated by teachers and students were quizzed to see if they’d paid attention. Now the knowledge itself is no longer scarce — is there a sense in which we should be teaching our kids how to “pull” the information they need instead of “pushing” in advance what we think they might need to know? Is there a sense in which the always-on information field of the web may be shifting what we think of as education? What are your thoughts?

I think we are not just on the threshold of some fundamental alterations to the ways we teach, but already well down a road which will alter the very idea of what teaching is about. That this isn't necessarily clear to us, or even noticed by many, is hardly surprising. Pull, not push — we have a lot to do to show students (and colleagues) how this works and what differences it makes.

In an apparently unrelated posting, Folksonomy Definition and Wikipedia, Thomas writes:

The lack of understanding the medium of a Wiki, which is very fluid, but not forgetful, is astonishing. They have been around for three or four years, if not longer. It is usually one of the first lessons anybody I have known learns when dealing with a Wiki, they move and when quoting them one must get the version of the information. They are a jumping off point, not destinations. They are true conversations, which have very real ethereal qualities. Is there no sense of research quality? Quoting a Wiki entry without pointing to the revision is like pointing to Time magazine without a date or issue number. Why is there no remedial instruction for using information in a Wiki?

Personally, I love Wikis and they are incredible tools, but one has to understand the boundaries. Wikis are emergent information tools and they are social tools. They are one of the best collaboration tools around, they even work very well for personal uses. But, like anything else it takes understanding on how to use them and use the information in them.

Thomas' posting is important on a number of fronts — folksonomy (obviously), how to use Wikipedia — but just now these remarks about how to use wikis struck home as I was pondering the push/pull question. Yes, Barb, things are shifting in education, and amongst the pressing challenges for us and our pupils is to learn what revision means and how, in pulling knowledge, we must acquire research disciplines that have hitherto been fairly embryonic at the secondary level.

Conversation is different from talk

Theodore Zeldin (shamelessly lifted from The Obvious — it's just too good and I want to remember it):

Conversation is different from talk

Talk in the past was about rising up the social scale. Etiquette - not what you thought. You had your place in society and that was it.

Conversation is a new thing. Conversation means who you keep company with. Not just the exchange of words - a social activity. When society was hierarchical we had one kind of conversation - now we need to invent a new kind of conversation. An exploration and self revelation. You each reveal things about what are important to you in your lives. You have admitted each other into private worlds and created links - you create shared experiences.

Women in the public sphere represent the biggest revolution since agriculture. They have introduced the complete human being into conversation and not just the trappings of power. Things can never be the same again.

I am trying to put together some thoughts about teaching and how it has changed over the last 20 years (the length of time I've been teaching). Zeldin's words (the above being Euan Semple's rough notes of what he heard Zeldin say) resonate very much with what I've been thinking about, particularly that last paragraph: the complete human being, in conversation.

Zeldin's website is The Oxford Muse, A foundation to stimulate courage and invention in personal, professional and cultural life. There's a biography of Zeldin on the website.

Institutions of this new century

via Pasta and Vinegar:

« My ideal XXIst century institution would appear less like an “institution” as such, than as a constantly evolving and flexible organism, or a network connecting people on a “global” mode, people who have ideas and people who act. It should be able to respond to the most varied forms of thought and media, and more precisely, to face the challenge represented by the new complexity arising from the merging of new forms of social emergency and new technologies. And while it develops it should also take in account the emergence of this other fact : the collapse of the centre of the world. »

Hou Hanru : curator indépendant in "Qu’attendez vous d’une institution artistique du XXI° siècle ?" (What do you expect from a XXIst century art institution ?). Ed palais de Tokyo. Conteners

I've always had the greatest problems with institutions and institutional life. ('Regimentation and education are incompatible' — Gerald Vann, OP.) Hou Hanru's vision is something I can understand and respond to. Nicolas Nova (Pasta and Vinegar) comments (I'm selecting and, in this instance, changing his emphases):

… it seems that this kind of definition is more applied recently to private companies in our supercapitalist days … Will private companies be organized like art groups? interactive labs?

(My son, Tom, who's studying in Paris, showed us round the palais de Tokyo earlier this year.)

Nifty Web 2.0 definition

I enjoyed Tim O'Reilly's long piece about Web 2.0, but his summary has focused my mind:

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an "architecture of participation," and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.

Yes!

Tom Coates writes of FooCamp:

It's absolutely clear to me that the whole reason for the event is the people and therefore the opportunities for creative collision and friction. As such, it has a tremendously collegiate non-competitive feel to it, with everyone believing that the best way to make great things and change the world is to share ideas and learn from each other.

This is exactly what I felt and feel about Reboot. It sounds excessive to say so, but nothing that happened during my five years at University quite compares with the excitement and stimulation of Reboot — because of the collegiate opportunities for intense, 'creative collision and friction'. I would add, also, how essential to the experience was the inter-disciplinary nature of the event — another feature of Reboot where my university experience compares badly: I was reading widely for myself back then, but my courses of study were fundamentally self-contained and introspective, one or two inspiring influences apart.

Tom Coates goes on:

As Danah has said, it's incredibly depressing and conflicting that this kind of event just doesn't scale well enough to let in all the people who should be there. I'm more than aware that there are hundreds of people in the world who would have had more to contribute to this event than I, and I was surprised to be invited and was humbled by the stature of many of the other participants. I think Danah kind of hints at something interesting when she talks about the parallel BarCamp, and about the nature of competition and alternatives. Perhaps a competitive market in collaborative events could be a way to achieve fairness - or maybe that makes the divides wider. Maybe it's impractical to think about collapsing hierarchies, and we should instead be proliferating them wildly - cut in all kinds of different directions, removing a sense of one embedded power structure and replacing it with hundreds of parallel, orthogonal ones. I don't know - scarcity of time, attention and resource have always been problems and we all have a responsibility to try and work out ways to alleviate them. In the meantime, all I can say is that FooCamp was a hell of an experience, and one that I'd delighted to have been able to attend.

Cost is also an issue, Tom! I was amazed, and immensely grateful, that my school sent me and Ian to Copenhagen. It shows vision and institutional commitment of a kind I've simply never encountered before in secondary education. But it couldn't stretch to San Francisco!

He's right: we have to find ways of opening up these experiences to as many people and budgets as possible. I am convinced that the future lies in this kind of collaborative, inter-disciplinary approach to work, play and learning. Educators have got to be brought into this.

Yahoo!'s edge?

'Isn't Smaller Just Better?' asks Christian Mayaud.  Barb at geeked.org posted:

Yahoo and Google are having a pissing contest. If only they had more women engineers to clue them in that size doesn’t matter nearly as much as how frequently you can deliver the best results. 

Size isn't the key, but leveraging the wisdom of your crowd of users may be. Over at tecznotes, Mike posts a recent Vox Delicii snapshot and asks questions about del.icio.us posting trends and the role of del.icio.us users who bookmark helpful/timely URLs (as evidenced by others subsequently bookmarking those URLs): is del.icio.us 'being used as a meta-bookmarking service' and are 'highly-popular bookmarks … themselves pointers to the real content'; are CollaborativeRank's "helpful users" helpful 'because they are quick on the draw, or because other users look to them for interesting places'?

It's the leveraging power of community bookmarking services that's now proving so useful to end-users: 'I end up checking Y!MyWeb2.0 each morning to see what links i should read' (Danah). Where does this leave search-engines? Kevin Kelleher has a good article in TheStreet.com (15 August), 'Yahoo!'s Brainpower'. Highlights:

… it's far too early to write off Yahoo!, which has been steadily, if quietly, building a stable of brilliant researchers on its own. Under the leadership of Usama Fayad, Yahoo!'s chief data officer, the company has brought in its share of intellectual caliber, most recently in the hiring of Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research, as well as a research partnership announced with the University of California, Berkeley.   

So, with all of the Google hype, why would any brainiac go work for Yahoo!? Raghavan and others at Yahoo! offer two compelling reasons: First, Yahoo! has the Rosetta Stone of online customer data. For 10 years, it's collected the daily search, email, financial and entertainment habits of users, which number in the hundreds of millions today. And second, by extension, that data open up a lot of areas of research beyond search -- including fast-developing areas such as social networking, user interface and data mining.

"There's no bigger collection of data on this planet. We're collecting 10 terabytes of data a day, and that doesn't include Web pages and 'html' content, which may be the primary focus of someone at Google," says Raghavan, a research veteran from Verity and IBM. Raghavan is also a Stanford consulting professor and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery.

"There's a tremendous opportunity here to address the mass consumer that has never really happened before in history," he says. "We get to study data and networking effects that show how people catch on to trends. And we get to study how to monetize all this, so there's an economic angle as well."

So, while Google workers may be feasting on arugula with dried apricots and capelin pesto, Yahoo!'s researchers are pigging out on deep data showing how online communities are built, how consumers open themselves to the long tail of entertainment niches and why sensible people would create and publish content without being paid a cent for it. Those questions are tightly woven with search technology, but extend well beyond it. …

In a nondescript office building in downtown Berkeley, a quarter-mile from the outskirts of the University of California, Yahoo! is starting an experiment that may have a significant impact on its future strategy. It's partnered with Professor Marc Davis, who came to Berkeley from MIT's pioneering Media Lab, to collaborate on work that Davis began in his Garage Cinema project. … Davis is already working closely with Yahoo! properties like Flickr, one of the earliest success stories in social networking. From a research standpoint, Flickr is something of a puzzle: How did a photo-sharing site develop a fiercely loyal community around it when Friendster, with all of its money and deep finance, couldn't? By watching how Flickr's community functions and grows, Davis can try to tackle an even bigger question: How can Flickr's niche-community DNA be replicated on a vastly larger scale -- say a community of 200 million global users? Yahoo! is betting research will help it create such a community, not simply react to them after they are built elsewhere.

Barb posted (socialsoftwareweblog) about her social bookmark wish-list. I commented there (#2) and referred to Ian Davis' idea of integrating into Google searches a user's RSS feed of his/her bookmarks (del.icio.us, etc). But this is still pretty much the "lonely user" model of search. Yahoo! is well set up to make searching much more of a collaborative affair.

I stumbled across the piece from TheStreet via Thomas' Off the Top feed, where his del.icio.us links for 15 August can be found. Subscribing to a number of del.icio.us user feeds has proved invaluable to me for many months, part of a wider conversation of which "traditional" searches now seem just a part.

The significant role of user experience

There's been a lot of excitement about Google fusing Keyhole and Google Maps. I just wish the rest of the world could get a look in …

Of this integration, Jason writes:

The addition was pretty big news … The ability to view satellite images online has been around for years in the form of Microsoft's Terraserver … So why is everyone so excited about it? … it … has a lot to do with someone I wrote about a couple of years ago: it's the user experience, stupid:

Robert Morris from IBM argued last year at Etech 2002 that -- and I'm paraphrasing from memory here -- most significant advances in software are actually advances in user experience, not in technology. …

The satellite feature on Google is no exception. They took something that's been around for years, made it way easier to use (reposition & zoom maps without reloading, pinpoint addresses and routes onto the satellite imagery, toggle between sat and road maps, map size automatically scales to the browser window, etc.), and suddenly this old thing is much more useful and fun to play around with.

Jason's examples: map view, satellite view. On the latter, I put in a simple, 'To here' address (210 3rd Ave, New York) and the result was this:

Don Park's take is well worth reading and John Battelle pointed me to MemoryMap, a 'Flickr/Google Maps mashup'.

Design is dissolving in behaviour, or should be

City of Sound:

So, basically, when you dock and sync your iPod Shuffle, it doesn't seem to update your Recently Played playlist, meaning iTunes (and Audioscrobbler's plugin) can't infer what you're been listening to on the Shuffle. The need to keep costs down I can understand. However, arguably the most interesting things about the products and devices emerging today is their ability to create or contribute towards a sense of self - both in terms of the product and the owner. As products get smarter in terms of being aware of their behaviour - in some senses, becoming reflexive - and as their raison d'être gets increasingly close to personal, social functionality - in some senses, becoming involved in presentation of self and the behaviour of the users - there is huge potential to build devices which become increasingly, personally meaningful, which can adapt to personal context and preference like never before. …

When I spoke about this in November, I paraphrased and extended Naoto Fukasawa's quote: that design is dissolving in behaviour, and products are emerging from it. I believe this to be a potentially powerful message in informational product design, and I'm disheartened that Apple have not seen that even their low-end devices should be part of this world. I'm not sure how easy it is for Apple to change that, either. I apologise to all concerned if I'm missing something basic, and the Shuffle does do these things and more, but at least it's forced me to articulate this idea of reflexive, social products within software systems increasingly focused on representation of self.

Last December, I collated a number of insights about design that I find important: 'Design dissolves in behaviour'.

A latpop for every child

Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and founder of MIT's Media Labs, says he is developing a laptop PC that will go on sale for less than $100 (£53). He told the BBC World Service programme Go Digital he hoped it would become an education tool in developing countries. He said one laptop per child could be " very important to the development of not just that child but now the whole family, village and neighbourhood". He said the child could use the laptop like a text book. He described the device as a stripped down laptop, which would run a Linux-based operating system, "We have to get the display down to below $20, to do this we need to rear project the image rather than using an ordinary flat panel. "The second trick is to get rid of the fat , if you can skinny it down you can gain speed and the ability to use smaller processors and slower memory." BBC News

David Weinberger comments:

I think it's a brilliant, world-changing idea, which doesn't mean it's going to be easy. But here's a place where hope needs to lead the business plan. Assume for a moment that it works. Imagine hundreds of millions of kids with networked laptops running linux and using open source applications: The outburst of creativity. The sudden change in social connection. The access via VOIP to the voices around the world. The sudden isolating of Microsoft. And, these puppies don't come with DRM burned into their circuits. Negroponte and his colleagues are moving the world forward. The $100 laptop is a platform for emergence.

Kayaking in chaos

Not a quiet weekend after all, but one when discussion on the web about tags and tagging — with implications for much more! — felt (for me) like we'd reached a clearing in the wood. (Though my metaphor should probably be one to do with rivers. Still, there's more than enough double-take to this post's title to be going on with.)

It began with yesterday's post by Clay Shirky on Many 2 Many:

… It doesn’t matter whether we “accept” folksonomies, because we’re not going to be given that choice. The mass amateurization of publishing means the mass amateurization of cataloging is a forced move. I think Liz’s examination of the ways that folksonomies are inferior to other cataloging methods is vital, not because we’ll get to choose whether folksonomies spread, but because we might be able to affect how they spread, by identifying ways of improving them as we go.

To put this metaphorically, we are not driving a car, with gas, brakes, reverse and a lot of choice as to route. We are steering a kayak, pushed rapidly and monotonically down a route determined by the environment. We have a (very small) degree of control over our course in this particular stretch of river, and that control does not extend to being able to reverse, stop, or even significantly alter the direction we’re moving in.

Cory commented: 'These paragraphs could just as readily apply to changes in copyright, lossily compressed music, or spam: they are characteristics inherent in the ecology itself. The discussion needs to center around how to exist in their presence, not how to change them.'

And just now, responding to David Weinberger's question posted earlier today, Aren't we going to innovate our way out of this?, Clay Shirky writes:

… My answer is yes, but only for small values of "out". A big part of what's coming is accepting and adapting to the mess, instead of exiting it. …   The Web … is chaos. Chaos! You can link anything to anything else! … How on earth can you organize the Web? It plainly isn't now, and it never can be. …

The whole of this last post needs to be read and thought about a long time (several whiskies). I particularly like: 'Anything that operates at really large scale takes on the characteristics of organic systems, including especially degeneracy, the principle that there is not a one-to-one mapping between function and location in the system. (Christopher Alexander got there a long time ago, in A City Is Not a Tree, to which we might only add that the Web is not a tree either.)'

There will be losses and gains. I like LaughingMeme's approach:

People are still too stiff and rigid with their tagging technique. Loosen up. You don't have to find the "right category" to put something into, that is part of the tyranny and inflexibility of a classification scheme that we're trying to get away from. Don't tell me what it is, the "truth" of it as it were. Tell my why it matters.

But I can see the force of Liz Lawley's concerns and we'll need to go on innovating as much as possible to limit the losses and maximise the gains.

Wikipedia and Heavy Metal

Watching John Udell's excellent screencast on Wikipedia's Heavy metal umlaut entry, I had one eye on the value of screencasting generally (see previous entry) and on what I was learning about Wikipedia. Ignoring the data and its accuracy/inaccuracy, for a while it took me back to days spent observing the early stages of growth in bacteria colonies — the parallel is superficial in lots of ways, but as words multiplied and covered blank space the 'hypnotic' (Udell's word) effect cast its spell and I almost felt I was watching something organic at work.

It is a fine demonstration of collaborative editing in action. The old questions remain, however: John Udell himself comments on that part of the entry that runs, 'This is a construction only found in the Jacaltec language of Guatemala' — 'and that fact, if it is a fact' …

Or, another example, the appearance and removal of references to heavy metal's sometime "interest" in Hitler and Nazi Germany. Udell remarks he wasn't surprised to see that go, but it left me wondering about the way the darker side of some bands and music gets treated. Even the plainer statement that 'The Nazi/Hitler theme is glorified by some heavy metal groups' was edited out — 'too strong', in Udell's commentary. Yet, from the Rolling Stones' darkest days, or Bowie's infamous Nazi salute, to heavy metal — here, surely, is something unglamorous and offensive that needs to be looked at critically and in detail. As it is, we're currently left with the thought that röckdöts are designed simply to give a 'tough Germanic feel' — no explanation as to why things Germanic should be considered 'tough'.

Mind-Web: II

The intense interest in tagging reached a new level last week with the news of Technorati Tags (Flickr + del.icio.us + blogs). It's been well noted that the reception has been very positive ('Overall, Technorati tags are going down rather well' — Suw) and there have been some excellent, and varied, early posts appearing as a result of this initiative from Technorati (eg, foe romeo; Curiouser — see the comments). Ross's post is a rich and stimulating overview of the implications.

Suw adds that 'I do, as usual, foresee a couple of small problems' (the need to enter tags "manually", the well-rehearsed problem of synonyms and plurals). I note also that categories are not tags (Technorati: 'categories will be read as tags') and that 'many of us want to keep our categories broad because they are intended to help a reader see all of our posts, and we want to be inclusive rather than fine-grained. If that's the case, then tags commonly used by categories are not going to be very useful when aggregated' (David Weinberger). Also, as Peter Kaminski notes, we need to 'start tagging links instead of just pages; that would enable Google-like link aggregation of tags. I also look forward to seeing tags better syndicated in something like Easy News Topics (ENT), and tools for publishing an individual's complete tag set/folksonomy and ways to map that to other folksonomies or taxonomies'.

Caveats aside, we are surely witnessing here the start of something significant. What David Weinberger has spotted is that Technorati is now brokering tags and Ross's sub-headings (Networked Individualism, Emergent Intelligence, Social Discovery) themselves sketch out some of the exciting implications: 'just think about the emergent intelligence mechanism we are creating with a neural network overlaid on the net. … Links and snapshots bridge across places, physical and virtual. Tags are applied in the blink of an eye and patterns emerge from the crowd'.

(If I could tag the comments I leave on sites, then that would be a great advance, too. I would also like to see something like Tinderbox's Category Factory for tagging/categorising non-Tinderbox posts.)

Mind-Web: I

Mind-web symbiosis, a tantalising prospect. For one thing, a mind's memory is now being under-written:

I'm slowly trying to teach myself the methodology that Doctorow has modeled for several years now: If you want to be able to find something in the future, don't bury it in your files -- blog about it, put it out on the Net, where Google will never lose it, and if for some reason you can't find it, someone else will probably have picked it up and saved it for you. Scott Rosenberg

And with this come changing social habits: the web and individual machines that we use (mine, friends', our work place's, cafés' …) flowing into one — my hard drives, my memory sticks, my camphone … all now integrated with web-based applications. Prompted by Jeremy Zawodny, I turned up Paul Graham's 2001 essay, 'The Other Road Ahead':

When we look back on the desktop software era, I think we'll marvel at the inconveniences people put up with … When you own a desktop computer, you end up learning a lot more than you wanted to know about what's happening inside it. …

There is now another way to deliver software that will save users from becoming system administrators. Web-based applications …  For the average user this new kind of software will be easier, cheaper, more mobile, more reliable, and often more powerful than desktop software. … you won't ordinarily need a computer, per se, to use software. All you'll need will be something with a keyboard, a screen, and a Web browser. Maybe it will have wireless Internet access. Maybe it will also be your cell phone. Whatever it is, it will be consumer electronics: something that costs about $200, and that people choose mostly based on how the case looks. You'll pay more for Internet services than you do for the hardware, just as you do now with telephones. … if you look at the kind of things most people use computers for, a tenth of a second latency would not be a problem. My mother doesn't really need a desktop computer, and there are a lot of people like her. …

The whole idea of "your computer" is going away, and being replaced with "your data." You should be able to get at your data from any computer. Or rather, any client, and a client doesn't have to be a computer.

Jeremy's comment: 'The more I find myself using increasingly larger and cheaper USB memory sticks, my colocated server, and on-line services like Flickr, I realize how my desktop and laptop computers are becoming less and less important in the grand scheme of things. And when I think about how popular web-based mail systems (Y! Mail, Hotmail, GMail) are, it's apparent that a lot of folks are keeping their data elsewhere.'

It's already happened for many of us, but let's not forget how few in number "we" still are: my teaching colleagues were amazed last week that I have on my hard drive files of data stretching back many years and I've long since grown used to their amazement that I keep e-mail. The gap between rich and poor nations preoccupies us, and quite rightly so, but the divisions within our own societies between the "digitally active" and the rest is so big it's often difficult to remember that it's there at all. To many of our co-workers and colleagues, computers are merely clever calculators, typewriters and terminals for Googling and grabbing an article.

We have a long way to go before we will have realised that vision of collaborative interaction, of many mind-webs working together across physical and temporal distances, that John Udell wrote about last December:

The blog network is made of people. We are the nodes, actively filtering and retransmitting knowledge. … The resemblance of this model to the summing of activation potentials in a neural system is more than superficial.

We need to do much more in schools to introduce students to the implications of the revolution that is the web. A point of entry that appeals to students is memory and it would be interesting to devise a sixth form course (in the UK, this means 17–18 year-olds) which takes in ancient memory practices, looks at tips and tricks, at Dominic O'Brien's Learn to Remember (etc) and also embraces digital and other, web-based developments that greatly enhance our ability to record and access individual and communal memory. At the far reaches of this canvas might be the (surely highly speculative, if undoubtedly ambitious!) project being undertaken by Artificial Development — an attempt to create an artificial neural network cognitive system (as reported by Roland Piquepaille last July). Once engaged, students might be led to discuss work such as that of Tom Daniel who 'integrates concepts in zoology, engineering, and mathematics'. This might then lead us back to the idea of the web as analogous to a neural system in which we are each a node and to a wider discussion of the biological metaphors underlying some of the ways we are coming to understand what we are creating in this thing we call the web and, in turn, what this tells us about ourselves  … I can envisage such a course — at once rich, allusive and tightly integrated with traditional knowledge and cutting-edge technology.

And when we tackle memory in this course, we must not forget forgetfulness! Anne Galloway wrote about this back in 2003, and linked there to Fabio Sergio (also writing in 2003):

All in all we are facing a future strung tight between the ideal, pacific world of the Memex, where man will be given "access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages", and one where Lenny Nero will feel at home, characterized by our collective inability to let go of our past. I keep hoping (and working) for the first scenario to become our future, but recognize it will require active involvement from everyone, driven by ample awareness of what's at stake.