A theme seems to be emerging in the PajamaNation. We are concerned with what individuals and small groups can do from there home that used to require institutions (or at least a trip across town). Well, the next great revolution may happen when we start creating, conserving and distributing energy from our homes. Not only can we collectively empower ourselves by playing a role in averting the expected disasters attached to global warming, we can spread the wealth that is generated by a plentiful and decentralized energy supplies. Energy is the engine of development. We no longer need to allow that engine to be monopolized by large institutions that may not have our best interests at heart. And even if the big energy conglomerates are well-intentioned, in the absence of some great technological breakthrough, the resolution to our energy needs is more likely to come from decentralized, distributed, and autonomous sources. Various futurists and environmental/energy activists have already traced an outline of how this might be accomplished. There is – in essence – a Web 2.0 solution to energy.
In last week's column, I quoted Clay Shirkey's description of the Internet as an end-to-end revolution. Now we are also moving into energy smart grids that give end-to-end intelligence to power production and distribution. Slowly but surely, people's homes and offices are becoming micro-generation sites. According to this model of energy production and distribution, you don't put up some enormous solar photovoltaic site that mimics the way energy has been produced by gas, coal and nuclear. Instead, you stick solar panels all over the place. Nanotechnology-based solar energy sheets that look like plastic wrap have already been displayed at various conventions and discussed in business magazines. This product should be on the market in a few years. This form of solar collector is not only unobtrusive and easy to distribute, it is expected to be twice as efficient as current solar power collectors. Here we have a form of solar power that will be cheap and easy to produce. Indeed, it is expected that it will follow the same sort of exponential downward price curve that we've seen with digital technology.
So imagine: you start putting thin sheet-like solar collectors everywhere -- on rooftops, cars, fences, on nearly every available surface. And then, you can do the same thing with wind. In the UK, substantial numbers have taken up home wind micro-turbines that don't take up much more space than a broadcast satellite. These are just two of myriad forms of energy that a home energy generator with minimal skills and minimal cash might be able to deal with in a few years.
Now imagine that millions of homes are micro-generating energy and that it's all being fed into some kind of grid. Futurist Jamais Cascio has suggested that there could be a sort of BitTorrent for energy. People could share their energy with family, friends and neighbors, tapping into the resource when they need to.
Another route towards resolving the energy situation from our homes involves conservation. Cascio wrote that we could support "everyone on the planet — 10 billion people, a bit more than the UN estimate for the end of the century — with Western lifestyles ... and using half the amount of energy we use today. All by paying slightly more attention to efficiency in our designs." One example of inefficiency is the power supplies we use for our electronics. They are only 20% - 40% efficient and the rest of the energy gets wasted. But for a few extra dollars, we can now get high efficiency power supplies.
The least advanced countries have the greatest potential for adopting new technologies, including energy efficient buildings and homes, simply because as development grows, they will be erecting new structures from scratch. Those who do not have to adjust new technologies to massive old structures – and those who do not have to tear down the old structures (imagine trying to create an energy efficient New York City by tearing all the inefficient old buildings down and making new ones) -- can integrate energy efficiency into design right from the start.
This clearly needs to be done immediately on a massive scale. And it's a win-win situation. Energy efficient buildings are environmentally helpful but they also save the occupants a whole lot of money.
As many of you undoubtedly already know, this idea – that developing nations have an advantage in adapting novel technological solutions – has been broadly recognized and labeled "leapfrogging." The popular example that has illustrated this phenomenon has been the adaptation of wireless phone systems as the primary telecommunications network in most developing areas. People have adapted the cell phone because they don't have the old, expensive, wire-based telephone networks from the 20th Century hanging around their necks like an albatross. Similarly, developing countries that don't have an enormous "gas station" and "car repair" infrastructure could more easily develop infrastructures around electric, hydrogen, and biodiesel.
Providing a new infrastructure for distributed energy grids and the tools for individuals and small businesses to be a part of that organism should become a new area for micropreneurship that fits in perfectly with the PajamaNation mission. Networked energy grids can eliminate the middleman, creating energy independence along with job independence. It is time to begin.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Our New Nation
The idea that there could be a global medium where anyone can send data to anyone else, and only the two ends know what to do with the data, has been the source of wave after wave of cultural freakout, from mailing lists to the web to Napster.
The end-to-end principle is one of a very few ideas in human history that are permanently radical — ideas that always provide leverage in the fight of the interesting versus the dull. Competitive markets are permanently radical, literacy is permanently radical, the First Amendment is permanently radical, and now we can add end-to-end to that list.
Clay Shirkey, 2002
Let's put aside labels like employer, employee, entrepreneur, worker, job-maker and job-taker for just a moment. Let's even put aside all monetary considerations for just a moment. In its rawest form, what PajamaNation does is act as an end-to-end conduit that helps people organize projects. It's an engine of creation, a real wealth (actual value as opposed to symbolic monetary value) generator.
It has also been conjectured by Walter de Brouwer and others that PN could be an agent of identity and community. People doing projects that do not need to take place on location in a "bricks-and-mortar institution" (this can include the neighborhood flower shop) -- and that are outside the realm of corporations and states – form a new and growing cohort group whose interests are still not frequently represented by organized society. When you go to a doctor's office and fill out a form, when the neighborhood cleanup crew starts making mind-wrecking noise outside your house at 9 am, it often becomes clear that the operative assumption is that all busy, productive people have left their homes to "go to work." And, indeed, it's still scary to walk down a suburban street on a weekday mid-afternoon and experience the place as a kind of privileged ghost town. Hasn't anybody gotten the message yet? 9-to-5 downtown is supposed to be dead.
Clearly, the micropreneurial work-at-home evolution is still only just emerging. But it's not too early to meditate on the implications of a "PajamaNation" as a nation -- and, in fact, as a global nation with more potential citizens right here and now than any other nation in the world.
If we emphasize the nation aspect of a PajamaNation, a whole new discourse -- and a whole new and exciting set of possibilities -- appears on the horizon. This aspect of the PajamaNation doesn't require that all its members have to be trying to hook up for projects. This conception of a PajamaNation has the potential to function as a sort-of people's decentralized "United Nations." By situating all of us participants in a cyberspace nation – by calling to us as people who – through mediated space -- are as close to one another as we are to our physical neighbors (or maybe closer), we may be on the new edge of the most important socio-political phenomenon of the 21st Century.
Think about it. Many idealists have tried to impact – with limited success – intractable social conflicts (Israel v. Palestine comes immediately to mind) through person-to-person diplomacy. The results have frequently been emotionally satisfying but the inability to get enough people together and talking to each other in physical space severely limits any real political impact that this strategy might produce.
By combining networked communication technology with an emergent new identity as a member of a global nation who is immediately connected to everybody else (they are all one click away), we could find ourselves at the forefront of a movement that replaces ideology and the interests of various elites with actual human needs and desires, as expressed by individuals, one signal at a time.
I had an epiphany the other day as I reviewed some angry comments left on a site in one of those endless, hostile political discussions that permeate the web. As I thought about it, I put aside some qualms and decided I was very much in favor of radically increasing Direct Democracy.
Most of the comments on this site (from all perspectives) were frankly objectively ignorant and illiterate. Some were semi-literate but fundamentally irrational – ideas didn't really follow one from the other, even though the commenters assumed that they did. Even the few comments from sophisticates –- the Marxist deconstructionist or the Ayn Randian free market advocate – seemed to me fundamentally incoherent, in content if not in style. As I thought about this, I was struck by the thought: We are all either part of an elite or we are yahoos. (Webster's defines yahoo as "a boorish, crass or stupid person, but that doesn't quite cover the implications that the word has taken on. It also means somebody who is clueless; someone who is unsophisticated because he or she is outside the zone where the sophisticates are privileged to be.) Don't be insulted by this. I'm a yahoo myself.
So why would I conclude that we should give these ordinary folks – yahoos like you and me and the several billion others -- more power over political policy decisions? Because this is the only way that we will grow up.
Today, the elites who make real policy decisions – whether they are elected representatives or hold power through other methods – are the sole possession of a certain kind of wisdom (although clearly, by their actions, it's a very limited wisdom.) They know, at a very fundamental level, that their thoughts and political positions have consequences because they will be acted upon. They may not be operating in the interests of all people (probably not), and they may frequently do stupid and dangerous things (obviously), but they know that the consequences of their actions will eventually be measured. This engenders a sort of sophistication that – while it does produce its own kind of blinding arrogance –- tends towards something like coherence. (I'm obviously not talking here about the nonsense that politicians feed to the yahoos, or even necessarily about political office holders. I'm talking about the policy elites who actually administer nation states, and who also tend to work with and for corporate and other moneyed elites.)
As outsiders, "yahoos", we rant and rave freely because there is very little consequence. In fact, under the current dispensation, it may be sort of healthy that some of us take extreme and angry and possibly even crazy positions within the mediated net-world because it functions as a shout from the edges that might just work its way into a larger sort-of meta-dialectic (for example, anti-globalization riots play a role in bringing about debt forgiveness, etc.). However, if we were to actually emerge into a situation where – through direct, mediated democracy -- we actually had power over policy, a more considered and sophisticated discourse would likely emerge, as people begin to actually consider and then even experience the consequences of their ideas. A sophisticated and flexible politic that combined common interests with flexible, personal autonomy and agency would hopefully emerge, eventually
A PajamaNation -- a global person-to-person nation mediated by cyberspace – might be at first a practice space for gaming the consequences of direct democratic decision making. Later, it might prove to be an emergent phenomenon that gets credit for making peace between conflicting groups as the result of direct contact and person-to-person negotiation. Ultimately, it may be an emergent structure for real world democracy during a century where we no longer need to send representatives to a far away place to make our decisions for us. We are -- all of us – now close enough at hand to govern ourselves, both alone and together.
The end-to-end principle is one of a very few ideas in human history that are permanently radical — ideas that always provide leverage in the fight of the interesting versus the dull. Competitive markets are permanently radical, literacy is permanently radical, the First Amendment is permanently radical, and now we can add end-to-end to that list.
Clay Shirkey, 2002
Let's put aside labels like employer, employee, entrepreneur, worker, job-maker and job-taker for just a moment. Let's even put aside all monetary considerations for just a moment. In its rawest form, what PajamaNation does is act as an end-to-end conduit that helps people organize projects. It's an engine of creation, a real wealth (actual value as opposed to symbolic monetary value) generator.
It has also been conjectured by Walter de Brouwer and others that PN could be an agent of identity and community. People doing projects that do not need to take place on location in a "bricks-and-mortar institution" (this can include the neighborhood flower shop) -- and that are outside the realm of corporations and states – form a new and growing cohort group whose interests are still not frequently represented by organized society. When you go to a doctor's office and fill out a form, when the neighborhood cleanup crew starts making mind-wrecking noise outside your house at 9 am, it often becomes clear that the operative assumption is that all busy, productive people have left their homes to "go to work." And, indeed, it's still scary to walk down a suburban street on a weekday mid-afternoon and experience the place as a kind of privileged ghost town. Hasn't anybody gotten the message yet? 9-to-5 downtown is supposed to be dead.
Clearly, the micropreneurial work-at-home evolution is still only just emerging. But it's not too early to meditate on the implications of a "PajamaNation" as a nation -- and, in fact, as a global nation with more potential citizens right here and now than any other nation in the world.
If we emphasize the nation aspect of a PajamaNation, a whole new discourse -- and a whole new and exciting set of possibilities -- appears on the horizon. This aspect of the PajamaNation doesn't require that all its members have to be trying to hook up for projects. This conception of a PajamaNation has the potential to function as a sort-of people's decentralized "United Nations." By situating all of us participants in a cyberspace nation – by calling to us as people who – through mediated space -- are as close to one another as we are to our physical neighbors (or maybe closer), we may be on the new edge of the most important socio-political phenomenon of the 21st Century.
Think about it. Many idealists have tried to impact – with limited success – intractable social conflicts (Israel v. Palestine comes immediately to mind) through person-to-person diplomacy. The results have frequently been emotionally satisfying but the inability to get enough people together and talking to each other in physical space severely limits any real political impact that this strategy might produce.
By combining networked communication technology with an emergent new identity as a member of a global nation who is immediately connected to everybody else (they are all one click away), we could find ourselves at the forefront of a movement that replaces ideology and the interests of various elites with actual human needs and desires, as expressed by individuals, one signal at a time.
I had an epiphany the other day as I reviewed some angry comments left on a site in one of those endless, hostile political discussions that permeate the web. As I thought about it, I put aside some qualms and decided I was very much in favor of radically increasing Direct Democracy.
Most of the comments on this site (from all perspectives) were frankly objectively ignorant and illiterate. Some were semi-literate but fundamentally irrational – ideas didn't really follow one from the other, even though the commenters assumed that they did. Even the few comments from sophisticates –- the Marxist deconstructionist or the Ayn Randian free market advocate – seemed to me fundamentally incoherent, in content if not in style. As I thought about this, I was struck by the thought: We are all either part of an elite or we are yahoos. (Webster's defines yahoo as "a boorish, crass or stupid person, but that doesn't quite cover the implications that the word has taken on. It also means somebody who is clueless; someone who is unsophisticated because he or she is outside the zone where the sophisticates are privileged to be.) Don't be insulted by this. I'm a yahoo myself.
So why would I conclude that we should give these ordinary folks – yahoos like you and me and the several billion others -- more power over political policy decisions? Because this is the only way that we will grow up.
Today, the elites who make real policy decisions – whether they are elected representatives or hold power through other methods – are the sole possession of a certain kind of wisdom (although clearly, by their actions, it's a very limited wisdom.) They know, at a very fundamental level, that their thoughts and political positions have consequences because they will be acted upon. They may not be operating in the interests of all people (probably not), and they may frequently do stupid and dangerous things (obviously), but they know that the consequences of their actions will eventually be measured. This engenders a sort of sophistication that – while it does produce its own kind of blinding arrogance –- tends towards something like coherence. (I'm obviously not talking here about the nonsense that politicians feed to the yahoos, or even necessarily about political office holders. I'm talking about the policy elites who actually administer nation states, and who also tend to work with and for corporate and other moneyed elites.)
As outsiders, "yahoos", we rant and rave freely because there is very little consequence. In fact, under the current dispensation, it may be sort of healthy that some of us take extreme and angry and possibly even crazy positions within the mediated net-world because it functions as a shout from the edges that might just work its way into a larger sort-of meta-dialectic (for example, anti-globalization riots play a role in bringing about debt forgiveness, etc.). However, if we were to actually emerge into a situation where – through direct, mediated democracy -- we actually had power over policy, a more considered and sophisticated discourse would likely emerge, as people begin to actually consider and then even experience the consequences of their ideas. A sophisticated and flexible politic that combined common interests with flexible, personal autonomy and agency would hopefully emerge, eventually
A PajamaNation -- a global person-to-person nation mediated by cyberspace – might be at first a practice space for gaming the consequences of direct democratic decision making. Later, it might prove to be an emergent phenomenon that gets credit for making peace between conflicting groups as the result of direct contact and person-to-person negotiation. Ultimately, it may be an emergent structure for real world democracy during a century where we no longer need to send representatives to a far away place to make our decisions for us. We are -- all of us – now close enough at hand to govern ourselves, both alone and together.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Living "A La Carte" or "I'll Have What My Friends Are Having"?
It's this years' "Long Tail" – the new book about how the Internet is shifting boundaries and distributing power. The book is called "Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder." David Weinberger, who touted the takeover of the geeks in an earlier book he co-authored with Christopher Locke, The Cluetrain Manifesto", has definitely hit the sweet spot this time.
Weinberger posits that we have entered into a third order, in terms of how we deal with ordering information. The first order is simply the physical organization of stuff – you have a bunch of books and you organize them according to theme. The second order brings in taxonomy. You start to develop classifications – meta-information about what is organized. So you have a bunch of books and you have a card catalogue. In the third order, the information has escaped all limits. The books at Amazon.com are more or less miscellaneous in their location. They don't need to be stacked in any section. The end user provides the taxonomy (or categorization) and hunts the books out. This is what's happening with all of our information. One of the tech guys at Wikipedia told Weinberger that he couldn't explain where a topic is located on his site. It isn't located. No matter how popular or obscure the topic, it is equally miscellaneously out there in wikipedian cyberspace along with everything else.
Resultantly, the end user supplies the taxonomy, makes the connections, and supplies the meaning. You might say that he or she strolls up to an infinite buffet of potential information, and chooses her "a la carte" combination plate in each and every circumstance.
But when I recently interviewed Weinberger for my NeoFiles podcast, he wasn't completely satisfied with the "a la carte" notion. For Weinberger, a la carte is only about an individual's selections. He related the metaphor to Negroponte's '90s concept that net dwellers would order up personalized news/information packages that could be called "The Daily Me." But Weinberger thinks that we are also – and more profoundly – gathering from the miscellaneous chaos of information through conversation and connection. We are engaged through social networks, blogs, del.icio.us lists, ad infinitum. We lead each other towards the stuff we want or need, and we start to notice and make meaning together.
It's also a six degrees of Kevin Bacon Virtual world in which everything links to everything else within six clicks. Location, to the extent that there is a location – a branded website perhaps – doesn't much interest us either. It is only the stuff that we can pull out of the miscellany that gets our attention. The only trusted "brand" is our circle of virtual friends – those with similar interests (or maybe , Boing Boing)
Everything is Miscellaneous
Everything is Miscellaneous Blog
My Interview with David Weinberger (sorry for the Skype fuzziness)
Weinberger posits that we have entered into a third order, in terms of how we deal with ordering information. The first order is simply the physical organization of stuff – you have a bunch of books and you organize them according to theme. The second order brings in taxonomy. You start to develop classifications – meta-information about what is organized. So you have a bunch of books and you have a card catalogue. In the third order, the information has escaped all limits. The books at Amazon.com are more or less miscellaneous in their location. They don't need to be stacked in any section. The end user provides the taxonomy (or categorization) and hunts the books out. This is what's happening with all of our information. One of the tech guys at Wikipedia told Weinberger that he couldn't explain where a topic is located on his site. It isn't located. No matter how popular or obscure the topic, it is equally miscellaneously out there in wikipedian cyberspace along with everything else.
Resultantly, the end user supplies the taxonomy, makes the connections, and supplies the meaning. You might say that he or she strolls up to an infinite buffet of potential information, and chooses her "a la carte" combination plate in each and every circumstance.
But when I recently interviewed Weinberger for my NeoFiles podcast, he wasn't completely satisfied with the "a la carte" notion. For Weinberger, a la carte is only about an individual's selections. He related the metaphor to Negroponte's '90s concept that net dwellers would order up personalized news/information packages that could be called "The Daily Me." But Weinberger thinks that we are also – and more profoundly – gathering from the miscellaneous chaos of information through conversation and connection. We are engaged through social networks, blogs, del.icio.us lists, ad infinitum. We lead each other towards the stuff we want or need, and we start to notice and make meaning together.
It's also a six degrees of Kevin Bacon Virtual world in which everything links to everything else within six clicks. Location, to the extent that there is a location – a branded website perhaps – doesn't much interest us either. It is only the stuff that we can pull out of the miscellany that gets our attention. The only trusted "brand" is our circle of virtual friends – those with similar interests (or maybe , Boing Boing)
Everything is Miscellaneous
Everything is Miscellaneous Blog
My Interview with David Weinberger (sorry for the Skype fuzziness)
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Is Work Play? Can It Be?
One of the stated goals of Pajama Nation is that small entrepreneurs and freelancers enjoy an a la carte lifestyle working for themselves. An ideal has apparently been developing over the past decade or so – the ideal is that work can be play. In the industrial age, most of us worked in non-creative and rather mechanistic -- if not downright oppressive -- jobs. (Nobody would claim that coal mining is fun). Today, an increasing number of people work at gigs that involve some thought and creativity – design, participating in the invention of new tools, creating and being part of media; whether it's big media or decentralized net media.
Indeed, some of the biggest industries in the world are dedicated to fun and games… literally games. They're making fun out there, but they may or may not be having fun. One hopes that they are.
During the boom of the late 1990s, a certain percentage of young folk in the advanced nations lived, ate and slept at their dot com businesses and they enjoyed the hell out of doing it. Maybe you remember the media write-ups about young men with nose rings skateboarding to work; the in-house massages; the midnight raves and the all day hacking sessions. Work and leisure were no longer in nice little compartments – work being something you do from 9 am – 5 pm on weekdays, and leisure being something you do the rest of the time. Life was 24/7 and people worked hard and played hard. (It's fine if you're 25, of course. The rest of us may want to work easy and play easy, but we're still seeking that same internal state – life as undivided continuum.)
Social critics have noted that the very idea of a "work day" is an artifact of the 17th Century. One of the features of a Pajama Nation is that we no longer "punch the clock." The integration of work, life and play is one of the greatest hopes for human happiness.
One great place to start thinking about all this is by reading "The Play Ethic", a book and a website by England's Pat Kane.
Indeed, some of the biggest industries in the world are dedicated to fun and games… literally games. They're making fun out there, but they may or may not be having fun. One hopes that they are.
During the boom of the late 1990s, a certain percentage of young folk in the advanced nations lived, ate and slept at their dot com businesses and they enjoyed the hell out of doing it. Maybe you remember the media write-ups about young men with nose rings skateboarding to work; the in-house massages; the midnight raves and the all day hacking sessions. Work and leisure were no longer in nice little compartments – work being something you do from 9 am – 5 pm on weekdays, and leisure being something you do the rest of the time. Life was 24/7 and people worked hard and played hard. (It's fine if you're 25, of course. The rest of us may want to work easy and play easy, but we're still seeking that same internal state – life as undivided continuum.)
Social critics have noted that the very idea of a "work day" is an artifact of the 17th Century. One of the features of a Pajama Nation is that we no longer "punch the clock." The integration of work, life and play is one of the greatest hopes for human happiness.
One great place to start thinking about all this is by reading "The Play Ethic", a book and a website by England's Pat Kane.
What Are We SEARCHing For?
John Battelle of FM Media recently pointed out an academic paper that explores what people value in search engines, and what the creators of search engines try to achieve. The piece is titled, "Is Relevance Relevant?" -- which seems to be a great general question for the age of blurred focus. The piece points out that search engines have been criticized for providing too much and too little information and shows the conundrum faced by businesses due to the fact that users hate heavily monetized, busy search engines, but of course, the ads and the other monetary schemes basically ARE the business.
The piece also references the good old days when Alta Vista -- with its academic orientation – was the leading search engine and implies that relevance as an objective idea has perhaps been abandoned in favor of "satisfying users."
I sometimes wonder why it's so hard to find really intelligent interesting content on the web that was so easy to find back in the mid-90s. This might be the answer. Google has replaced real intelligence with a mixture of business interests and the "wisdom of crowds." Thus, when I ego surf – let's be honest here, who doesn't? -- I no longer seem to find fascinating complicated criticisms of my work. Rather, I find an endless circle jerk of sites pointing out that some piece that I've written exists – the posts point at the article and point at each other. There are no thoughts, just fingers pointing in various directions. (I think this idea was expressed in a scene in The Beatles' Yellow Submarine) In some ways, this is the way the net looks today.
Not that I want to bring back Alta Vista. But here's an interesting thought from an interview I did with Cory Doctorow a few years back:
"It's pursuing the deviance, what Bruce Sterling called 'Wooing the muse of the odd' that actually creates a system that has a lot of perceived value. I think that every single one of us is an edge case. There's this amazing Bill Gates quote from Davos last week where he was talking about how Microsoft was going to get back into search and compete with Google and someone said, 'You know you guys did a pretty crappy job with search the first time around.' And he said, [paraphrasing] 'Yeah. You know what we did? We focused on the 20% of the queries that represented 80% of what people were looking for instead of the 20% that were really odd. But what we found out is that the whole perception of value lives in whether or not it meets those little queries.'"
So the answer my friend is further down the long tail, not back toward an academic elite.
Read "Is Relevance Relevant"
The piece also references the good old days when Alta Vista -- with its academic orientation – was the leading search engine and implies that relevance as an objective idea has perhaps been abandoned in favor of "satisfying users."
I sometimes wonder why it's so hard to find really intelligent interesting content on the web that was so easy to find back in the mid-90s. This might be the answer. Google has replaced real intelligence with a mixture of business interests and the "wisdom of crowds." Thus, when I ego surf – let's be honest here, who doesn't? -- I no longer seem to find fascinating complicated criticisms of my work. Rather, I find an endless circle jerk of sites pointing out that some piece that I've written exists – the posts point at the article and point at each other. There are no thoughts, just fingers pointing in various directions. (I think this idea was expressed in a scene in The Beatles' Yellow Submarine) In some ways, this is the way the net looks today.
Not that I want to bring back Alta Vista. But here's an interesting thought from an interview I did with Cory Doctorow a few years back:
"It's pursuing the deviance, what Bruce Sterling called 'Wooing the muse of the odd' that actually creates a system that has a lot of perceived value. I think that every single one of us is an edge case. There's this amazing Bill Gates quote from Davos last week where he was talking about how Microsoft was going to get back into search and compete with Google and someone said, 'You know you guys did a pretty crappy job with search the first time around.' And he said, [paraphrasing] 'Yeah. You know what we did? We focused on the 20% of the queries that represented 80% of what people were looking for instead of the 20% that were really odd. But what we found out is that the whole perception of value lives in whether or not it meets those little queries.'"
So the answer my friend is further down the long tail, not back toward an academic elite.
Read "Is Relevance Relevant"
What are we SEARCHing For?
John Battelle of FM Media recently pointed out an academic paper that explores what people value in search engines, and what the creators of search engines try to achieve. The piece is titled, "Is Relevance Relevant?" -- which seems to be a great general question for the age of blurred focus. The piece points out that search engines have been criticized for proving too much and too little information and shows the conundrum faced by businesses due to the fact that users hate heavily monetized, busy search engines, but of course, the ads and the other monetary schemes basically ARE the business.
The piece also references the good old days when Alta Vista -- with its academic orientation – was the leading search engine and claims that relevance as an objective idea has been attended in favor of "satisfying users."
I sometimes wonder why it's so hard to find really intelligent interesting content on the web that was so easy to find back in the mid-90s. This might be the answer. Google has replaced real intelligence with a mixture of business interests and the "wisdom of crowds." Thus, when I ego surf – let's be honest here -- I no longer seem to find fascinating complicated criticism of my work. Rather I find an endless circle jerk of sites pointing out that some piece that I've written exists – one after another. No thoughts, just fingers pointing in various directions. In some ways, this is the way the net looks today.
Not that I want to bring back Alta Vista. But here's an interesting thought from an interview I did with Cory Doctorow a few years back:
"It's pursuing the deviance, what Bruce Sterling called 'Wooing the muse of the odd' that actually creates a system that has a lot of perceived value. I think that every single one of us is an edge case. There's this amazing Bill Gates quote from Davos last week where he was talking about how Microsoft was going to get back into search and compete with Google and someone said, 'You know you guys did a pretty crappy job with search the first time around.' And he said, [paraphrasing] 'Yeah. You know what we did? We focused on the 20% of the queries that represented 80% of what people were looking for instead of the 20% that were really odd. But what we found out is that the whole perception of value lives in whether or not it meets those little queries.'"
So the answer my friend is further down the long tail, not back toward an academic elite.
Read "Is Relevance Relevant"
Read the RU Sirius Interview with Cory Doctorow
The piece also references the good old days when Alta Vista -- with its academic orientation – was the leading search engine and claims that relevance as an objective idea has been attended in favor of "satisfying users."
I sometimes wonder why it's so hard to find really intelligent interesting content on the web that was so easy to find back in the mid-90s. This might be the answer. Google has replaced real intelligence with a mixture of business interests and the "wisdom of crowds." Thus, when I ego surf – let's be honest here -- I no longer seem to find fascinating complicated criticism of my work. Rather I find an endless circle jerk of sites pointing out that some piece that I've written exists – one after another. No thoughts, just fingers pointing in various directions. In some ways, this is the way the net looks today.
Not that I want to bring back Alta Vista. But here's an interesting thought from an interview I did with Cory Doctorow a few years back:
"It's pursuing the deviance, what Bruce Sterling called 'Wooing the muse of the odd' that actually creates a system that has a lot of perceived value. I think that every single one of us is an edge case. There's this amazing Bill Gates quote from Davos last week where he was talking about how Microsoft was going to get back into search and compete with Google and someone said, 'You know you guys did a pretty crappy job with search the first time around.' And he said, [paraphrasing] 'Yeah. You know what we did? We focused on the 20% of the queries that represented 80% of what people were looking for instead of the 20% that were really odd. But what we found out is that the whole perception of value lives in whether or not it meets those little queries.'"
So the answer my friend is further down the long tail, not back toward an academic elite.
Read "Is Relevance Relevant"
Read the RU Sirius Interview with Cory Doctorow
Monday, April 30, 2007
One Laptop Per Child Project in Trouble?
Many people who want to see the connectivity of the net more broadly distributed have been enthusiastically following Nicholas Negroponte's project "One Laptop Per Child." (OLPC) The idea was to get a laptop called "Children's Machine XO" out on the market at $100 per laptop, using open source software. From there, the long term ideal of the project would be to get one each into the hands of all the world's children. But on April 26, Negroponte announced a new deal. The OLPC machine is going to run on Windows and now the price is going to be $175. He also backed off their goal of an initial 5 million unit production run, and has instituted several other policy changes.
The politics behind it: It's generally understood that Microsoft had enough power in many nations across the globe to pressure them – indeed blackmail them -- from buying the open source versions of OLPC. OLPC enthusiasts feel that another "change the world" project has been turned into just another mass marketing opportunity for the Evil Empire.
On the independent "One Laptop Per Child News" site, Lee Felsentein – the computer revolutionary who – with Efrem Lipkin, started the Homebrew Computer Club that basically started Personal Computing, suggests that those who worked on the open source version of OLPC will now be excluded from participation and that they should take their work and run – try to do this as an independent project.
Felsenstein writes: "What is the status of the code base currently developed for OLPC? Is it accessible and freely available to be used by others? Someone closer to the project should make sure that this code base cannot be appropriated and kept from use by others.
"If the XO machine becomes unavailable to those who develop external software for it, then a replacement platform should be designed. This isn’t the hard part – the foundation of the project will be the software, especially the application software. I would recommend that a substitute platform for software development be specified and made available."
No doubt, if and when the OLPC machine starts getting distributed, it will be better than nothing (but not much better, considering Windows' famous vulnerabilities). And Bill Gates will be all over the media getting and taking credit for this idealistic project to bring computing to the world's poor. And the initial impetus behind the project will get no media coverage and will never penetrate the mainstream discourse. As Kurt Vonnegut put it, "And so it goes."
Read the entire Lee Felsenstein piece
The politics behind it: It's generally understood that Microsoft had enough power in many nations across the globe to pressure them – indeed blackmail them -- from buying the open source versions of OLPC. OLPC enthusiasts feel that another "change the world" project has been turned into just another mass marketing opportunity for the Evil Empire.
On the independent "One Laptop Per Child News" site, Lee Felsentein – the computer revolutionary who – with Efrem Lipkin, started the Homebrew Computer Club that basically started Personal Computing, suggests that those who worked on the open source version of OLPC will now be excluded from participation and that they should take their work and run – try to do this as an independent project.
Felsenstein writes: "What is the status of the code base currently developed for OLPC? Is it accessible and freely available to be used by others? Someone closer to the project should make sure that this code base cannot be appropriated and kept from use by others.
"If the XO machine becomes unavailable to those who develop external software for it, then a replacement platform should be designed. This isn’t the hard part – the foundation of the project will be the software, especially the application software. I would recommend that a substitute platform for software development be specified and made available."
No doubt, if and when the OLPC machine starts getting distributed, it will be better than nothing (but not much better, considering Windows' famous vulnerabilities). And Bill Gates will be all over the media getting and taking credit for this idealistic project to bring computing to the world's poor. And the initial impetus behind the project will get no media coverage and will never penetrate the mainstream discourse. As Kurt Vonnegut put it, "And so it goes."
Read the entire Lee Felsenstein piece
Friday, April 27, 2007
Glocal Dynamism & Immigration
We're thinking glocally here at Pajama Nation, but we also have to recognize the drift and exchange of human beings across the globe that has been growing with transporation and other technologies. Right now the drift is still towards people emigrating from the "third world" to the advanced nations like the US and Europe. Most people see this as a one way street, since the drift of bodies is basically in one direction. But a recent New York Times article -- "A Good Provider is One Who Leaves" -- shows a healthy dynamic between those who leave and those who stay. Immigrants are getting capital and shifting it back to their earlier locales, and we begin to see growth and development "back home: as the result. of that "redistribution" of capital.
Quoting the New York Times:
"About 200 million migrants from different countries are scattered across the globe, supporting a population back home that is as big if not bigger. Were these half-billion or so people to constitute a state — migration nation — it would rank as the world’s third-largest. While some migrants go abroad with Ph.D.’s, most travel ... with modest skills but fearsome motivation. The risks migrants face are widely known, including the risk of death, but the amounts they secure for their families have just recently come into view. Migrants worldwide sent home an estimated $300 billion last year — nearly three times the world’s foreign-aid budgets combined. These sums — 'remittances' — bring Morocco more money than tourism does. They bring Sri Lanka more money than tea does. ...In 22 countries, remittances exceed a tenth of the G.D.P., including Moldova (32 percent), Haiti (23 percent) and Lebanon (22 percent).
A nice little think piece by Alex Steffan on the WorldChanging website expands further on the possibilities of this glocal exchange of energy between those who forage out for resources and those who build the nest back home.
Quoting Steffan:
"inding better ways to connect migrants with the financial services they and their families and business partners back home need is key as well, many experts say. Particularly promising is the idea of productizing remittances -- sending goods instead of money.
"But a whole host of other innovative financial services might make migrants' checks home both more effective and more frequent, from micro-finance banks to micro-insurance, even meso-financial investment opportunities. Creating such new services will require a pretty rapid case of redistributing the future, helping nations to develop not only the proper laws and proper policies, but even the proper software.
"Now, imagine this: imagine all these enterprising, ambitious people, and all the money they send home (and all the institutions with which they interact to send it) being bent towards even more beneficial ends, becoming better, longer levers for really remaking the nations from which they're traveled into places of prosperity and sustainability. Imagine deciding to make migrant labor truly worldchanging."
"
Read Full NY Times Article
Read Full WorldChanging Article
Quoting the New York Times:
"About 200 million migrants from different countries are scattered across the globe, supporting a population back home that is as big if not bigger. Were these half-billion or so people to constitute a state — migration nation — it would rank as the world’s third-largest. While some migrants go abroad with Ph.D.’s, most travel ... with modest skills but fearsome motivation. The risks migrants face are widely known, including the risk of death, but the amounts they secure for their families have just recently come into view. Migrants worldwide sent home an estimated $300 billion last year — nearly three times the world’s foreign-aid budgets combined. These sums — 'remittances' — bring Morocco more money than tourism does. They bring Sri Lanka more money than tea does. ...In 22 countries, remittances exceed a tenth of the G.D.P., including Moldova (32 percent), Haiti (23 percent) and Lebanon (22 percent).
A nice little think piece by Alex Steffan on the WorldChanging website expands further on the possibilities of this glocal exchange of energy between those who forage out for resources and those who build the nest back home.
Quoting Steffan:
"inding better ways to connect migrants with the financial services they and their families and business partners back home need is key as well, many experts say. Particularly promising is the idea of productizing remittances -- sending goods instead of money.
"But a whole host of other innovative financial services might make migrants' checks home both more effective and more frequent, from micro-finance banks to micro-insurance, even meso-financial investment opportunities. Creating such new services will require a pretty rapid case of redistributing the future, helping nations to develop not only the proper laws and proper policies, but even the proper software.
"Now, imagine this: imagine all these enterprising, ambitious people, and all the money they send home (and all the institutions with which they interact to send it) being bent towards even more beneficial ends, becoming better, longer levers for really remaking the nations from which they're traveled into places of prosperity and sustainability. Imagine deciding to make migrant labor truly worldchanging."
"
Read Full NY Times Article
Read Full WorldChanging Article
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Contrarian Thoughts About the Long Tail
Famous tech entrepreneurial billionaire Mark Cuban offered some interesting takes on the downside of the Long Tail on his blog, and I can attest to the truth of what he's saying when he writes, "No Content Creator wants to be on the Long Tail." Or I'd amend that to read no professional content creator wants to be on the long tail. Content creators want to break through the "content ceiling" – we want our work to break through the clutter and attain economic value, and continue to bring in money. For us, the Long Tail is inflation of the worst sort. The market is flooded with free writing. It's mostly crap writing, but most people don't know the difference. Everybody can write up to a certain level of competence. In other words, if someone is not a piano player, they will sit at the piano and hit the wrong notes and nobody will listen. If somebody is not a "writer" in the sense that those of us who are writers mean it, they can still sit down and communicate.
Cuban writes, "If the goal is commercial, whether to make money directly or indirectly from the content, then the battle to fight through the Content Ceiling begins." And "Very few commercial content creators aspire to get 10k aggregate views from all the videohosting sites. Very few bands are happy with having 10k free downloads , or even 10k friends on Myspace as their endgame. Very few commercial content creators aspire to see their creations end up on Community Access TV. All content creators recognize each of these as a way to create incremental demand for their content, in hopes of breaking through the Content Ceiling, but none of these will reward the content creator with direct revenue. For content creators trying to make a living from their work, they all just represent the Long Tail Ghetto."
This is all about the downside of Long Tail economics. Those that build the thoroughfare, the aggregators make the big bucks. Those that fill in the content, mostly, do it happily… for free. The net is a playground for interaction. A few comfortable technophiles like Chris Anderson and Cory Doctorow (I love Cory and think he's a genius but I do think he's a bit glib about this) are excessively glib about how all this effects artists – musicians, writers, ad infinitum. The narrative is that you can use your music, writing, etc. to get people's attention and then offer them something else. WHAT? The lecture market dried up fifteen years ago, the mid-level book authors are being axed by a declining book industry, magazines are dying and most of the ones that exist are deadly to the imagination.
Speaking to those who are seriously trying to get ahead with content-based projects, Cuban writes, "For all the talk of the internet changing distribution, the reality is that in order to break through the Content Ceiling and to climb the Vert Ramp, 99.9 pct of content creators are going to do need OPM (Other Peoples Money). The internet alone is not going to get the job done. You can put your content everywhere and anywhere the net allows you to be hosted, but for most people the amount of revenues for that content you had before you started the hosting process will be the exact same as what you have after the hosting process."
Of course, there's no fighting the distribution of tools for communication to the great masses, and I'm in favorite it. PJ is part of this process. But it's worth remembering the downside. There is also a possible market here, servicing quality "content creators" and helping them to find new markets. It's something to think about.
Read the entire piece
Cuban writes, "If the goal is commercial, whether to make money directly or indirectly from the content, then the battle to fight through the Content Ceiling begins." And "Very few commercial content creators aspire to get 10k aggregate views from all the videohosting sites. Very few bands are happy with having 10k free downloads , or even 10k friends on Myspace as their endgame. Very few commercial content creators aspire to see their creations end up on Community Access TV. All content creators recognize each of these as a way to create incremental demand for their content, in hopes of breaking through the Content Ceiling, but none of these will reward the content creator with direct revenue. For content creators trying to make a living from their work, they all just represent the Long Tail Ghetto."
This is all about the downside of Long Tail economics. Those that build the thoroughfare, the aggregators make the big bucks. Those that fill in the content, mostly, do it happily… for free. The net is a playground for interaction. A few comfortable technophiles like Chris Anderson and Cory Doctorow (I love Cory and think he's a genius but I do think he's a bit glib about this) are excessively glib about how all this effects artists – musicians, writers, ad infinitum. The narrative is that you can use your music, writing, etc. to get people's attention and then offer them something else. WHAT? The lecture market dried up fifteen years ago, the mid-level book authors are being axed by a declining book industry, magazines are dying and most of the ones that exist are deadly to the imagination.
Speaking to those who are seriously trying to get ahead with content-based projects, Cuban writes, "For all the talk of the internet changing distribution, the reality is that in order to break through the Content Ceiling and to climb the Vert Ramp, 99.9 pct of content creators are going to do need OPM (Other Peoples Money). The internet alone is not going to get the job done. You can put your content everywhere and anywhere the net allows you to be hosted, but for most people the amount of revenues for that content you had before you started the hosting process will be the exact same as what you have after the hosting process."
Of course, there's no fighting the distribution of tools for communication to the great masses, and I'm in favorite it. PJ is part of this process. But it's worth remembering the downside. There is also a possible market here, servicing quality "content creators" and helping them to find new markets. It's something to think about.
Read the entire piece
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Building Community
Guy Kawasaki was the ultimate tech evangelist, creating insane enthusiasm for the "insanely great" Macintosh back in 1984. Apple was extraordinarily successful in bringing together communities of Mac users all across the US (and the world?). Mac User groups sprang up everywhere (and without MeetUp!) and the endless fanaticism of Mac enthusiasts may owe something to Kawasaki's understanding of community dymanics. I recently ran across a piece on his blog about The Art of Creating Community. Maybe you too can, in Kawaski's words, generate "unpaid, raging, inexorable thunderlizard evangelists for MacIntosh and Apple II."
A few of the strong points from the piece:
"Identify and recruit your thunderlizards—immediately! Most companies are stupid: they go for months and then are surprised: “Never heard of them. You mean there are groups of people forming around our products?”
"Assign one person the task of building a community. Sure, many employees would like to build a community, but who wakes up every day with this task at the top of her list of priorities?"
In a global and multicultural project like Pajama Nation, we'll have more than one person – one person per continent, perhaps.
"Foster discourse. The definition of 'discourse' is a verbal exchange. The key word here is “exchange.” Any company that fosters community building should also participate in the exchange of ideas and opinions. At the basic level of community building, your website should provide a forum where customers can engage in discourse with one another as well as with the company's employees."
It's never too early to think about how to get people excitedly arguing and discussing and adding value to a company project. As Kawasaki himself says in this piece, don't stifle dissent. In fact, it's good to turn the whole ideology of the company upside down once in awhile and see what shakes out. (I'll be posting about some "Long Boom" critiques in a few days).
Read the full Guy Kawasaki post
A few of the strong points from the piece:
"Identify and recruit your thunderlizards—immediately! Most companies are stupid: they go for months and then are surprised: “Never heard of them. You mean there are groups of people forming around our products?”
"Assign one person the task of building a community. Sure, many employees would like to build a community, but who wakes up every day with this task at the top of her list of priorities?"
In a global and multicultural project like Pajama Nation, we'll have more than one person – one person per continent, perhaps.
"Foster discourse. The definition of 'discourse' is a verbal exchange. The key word here is “exchange.” Any company that fosters community building should also participate in the exchange of ideas and opinions. At the basic level of community building, your website should provide a forum where customers can engage in discourse with one another as well as with the company's employees."
It's never too early to think about how to get people excitedly arguing and discussing and adding value to a company project. As Kawasaki himself says in this piece, don't stifle dissent. In fact, it's good to turn the whole ideology of the company upside down once in awhile and see what shakes out. (I'll be posting about some "Long Boom" critiques in a few days).
Read the full Guy Kawasaki post
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Micropreneurship is Punk Rock
Back in the 1970s, in the darkest days of mass media, we were all still presumed to be industrial age workers looking for life-long jobs. After a tough day at the office or factory, we might come home and watch TV or listen to music by privileged, aging, post-hippie rock bands still selling us dreams of sex, drugs, rock and roll and liberation -- provided to us by the music companies. As a young musician (vocalist) in a small town, the idea that you could get together and write and perform original music was simply unthinkable. One of my talented friends became a clone of Todd Rundgren and played nothing but Todd music, occasionally performing in a Rundgren/Utopia clone band. Another friend played nothing but Frank Zappa. That kid was so talented on the guitar that he couldn’t find anybody else to play with. Another friend of mine became Keith Richard (you can just imagine), and he played that shit better than Ron Woods does! That suited my vocal style (Mick-like) so we learned every song in the catalogue, but performed only once.
I wrote lots of song lyrics myself but nobody in Binghamton, New York could even imagine starting an original band. Neither, no doubt, could anyone imagine making an independent film or video that anyone would actually see, etc.
If you weren’t there, it’s hard to get across the complete lack of a sense of confidence and power that those of us with a creative streak had in those days. You had to go out and make it really big or you had to give up. You could go out and become a monstrously popular band worthy of a recording contract or move to Hollywood and navigate the TV and film industries. Most likely, you decided that the creative life – where your voice would be heard – was beyond reach, and you accepted your silencing with bitter resignation.
What changed that wasn’t the Internet. What changed it was a bunch of frantic young weirdos with spiky hair and anarchy on their minds. Starting in around 1977, a Do It Yourself (DIY) ethic appeared around punk rock (the music style had been going on in NYC since about 1974). Slowly but surely, young people everywhere got the idea that they could pick up the cheapest tools available to them, learn to play a few chords, start a band, start a small independent music label, start a music club, start a punk “zine”, make punk clothes, ad infinitum.
When I returned to Binghamton New York for a visit in the mid-1980s, all of those friends had been in bands that played original music. They’d made their own records. The “Keith Richards” guy had gotten into making small films and had wound up hanging out with Jack Nicholson in LA. Nobody really made much money, but everybody got a sense of self and a sense of agency in the world. In the context of contemporary culture, THIS is where the “long tail” started.
Of course, one can’t go back and rerun history to see what would have happened if punk rock hadn’t risen up from some strange place in the American and British psyche. But the generations after punk never had any doubts that if they had something to express, there was a way to go out and express it. They new that they didn’t have to be media consumers only. They could be creators (or prosumers.) It is my contention that the entire distributed, participatory internet culture with its YouTubers and bloggers ad infinitum would have gone through a very long slow birth if the new generations hadn’t grown up just assuming that they could “Do It Yourself.” The early adopters would have been far fewer – the ramp up would have been much slower. It’s even conceivable that a more corporate vision of the internet – internet as shopping mall – might have become dominant.
Today, as we decentralize and distribute everything, including jobs and business, we are all punk rockers.
I wrote lots of song lyrics myself but nobody in Binghamton, New York could even imagine starting an original band. Neither, no doubt, could anyone imagine making an independent film or video that anyone would actually see, etc.
If you weren’t there, it’s hard to get across the complete lack of a sense of confidence and power that those of us with a creative streak had in those days. You had to go out and make it really big or you had to give up. You could go out and become a monstrously popular band worthy of a recording contract or move to Hollywood and navigate the TV and film industries. Most likely, you decided that the creative life – where your voice would be heard – was beyond reach, and you accepted your silencing with bitter resignation.
What changed that wasn’t the Internet. What changed it was a bunch of frantic young weirdos with spiky hair and anarchy on their minds. Starting in around 1977, a Do It Yourself (DIY) ethic appeared around punk rock (the music style had been going on in NYC since about 1974). Slowly but surely, young people everywhere got the idea that they could pick up the cheapest tools available to them, learn to play a few chords, start a band, start a small independent music label, start a music club, start a punk “zine”, make punk clothes, ad infinitum.
When I returned to Binghamton New York for a visit in the mid-1980s, all of those friends had been in bands that played original music. They’d made their own records. The “Keith Richards” guy had gotten into making small films and had wound up hanging out with Jack Nicholson in LA. Nobody really made much money, but everybody got a sense of self and a sense of agency in the world. In the context of contemporary culture, THIS is where the “long tail” started.
Of course, one can’t go back and rerun history to see what would have happened if punk rock hadn’t risen up from some strange place in the American and British psyche. But the generations after punk never had any doubts that if they had something to express, there was a way to go out and express it. They new that they didn’t have to be media consumers only. They could be creators (or prosumers.) It is my contention that the entire distributed, participatory internet culture with its YouTubers and bloggers ad infinitum would have gone through a very long slow birth if the new generations hadn’t grown up just assuming that they could “Do It Yourself.” The early adopters would have been far fewer – the ramp up would have been much slower. It’s even conceivable that a more corporate vision of the internet – internet as shopping mall – might have become dominant.
Today, as we decentralize and distribute everything, including jobs and business, we are all punk rockers.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Micro-Branding
Chris Anderson’s Long Tail blog linked recently to a fascinating essay by Mohammed Iqbal of Ogilvy & Mather Advertising. At the start of the essay, Iqbal writes about a “celebrated speech at Cannes last year” delivered by Lord Maurice Saatchi. Saatchi told the audience that “To succeed in a world of message fragmentation, media fragmentation, continuous partial attention (CPA), and non-existent day-after-recalls (DAR), one has to hone the brand positioning relentlessly, until only one word – yes, one measly word remained. Two words were one word too many, as Lord Saatchi reminded those pleading for lenience.”
And then Iqbal goes ahead and tears Saatchi a new one. (Maybe Saatchi should stick to sponsoring shocking post-Duchampian art exhibits.) The article goes on to refute the premise and proposes that more is better – people want richer content, information and memes that suit them personally, and even branding games that they can participate in. In the distributed word Pajama People are demanding more, not less.
Iqbal writes: “Russell Davies, planner provocateur and ex-world wide planning head of Nike, wrote on his blog (though not directly in response to Lord Saatchi’s speech) : “What people actually want is stuff with some complexity, some meat, some richness. Stuff that has depth, humour, tension, drama etc etc. Not stuff that's distilled to a simple essence or refined to a single compelling truth. No one ever came out of a movie and said "I really liked that. It was really clear." Clarity is important to our research methodologies, not to our consumers.
“Judging by the reaction to this post and by the Mexican wave of blog posts and comments criticizing One Word Equity, it was obvious this idea of brand polyphony (as Russell calls it) was infectious and appealing. It’s appealing because we ourselves as consumers seek it. We find fault in movie-characters for being too uni-dimensional. We say people are uninteresting (or boring) if their range of interests or conversations are too narrow.”
The piece is worth quoting from extensively.
“The fragmentation and abundance of media has now helped lower the barriers to connecting the supply and demand of more brand messages – theoretically of all possible brand messages.
“For eg, Volvo’s primary brand proposition could continue to be safety. But if there’re people out there who relate to it as a stylish car, you can create communication tailor-made for them. Simultaneously, another bunch of people might actually like a Volvo for its European-ness. No longer will they have to ignore that connection and only seek ‘safety’ in Volvos.”
“In a long tail world, the real opportunity is not in pre-filtering what’s available but in making everything available to everybody. And providing the aggregated audience the tools to sort out what’s good from what’s not (like Flickr does for photos with its folksonomy, for eg.)”
“In a long tail brand communication, all possible brand messages are simultaneously available in the market.”
“When you have infinite choice, context is more important than content. For too long advertisers and communicators have focused only on what they are saying and not enough on who they are speaking to and where the conversation is happening. And even when they do so, they have almost always painted the picture with broad and all-encompassing brushstrokes.”
Read the entire essay (WARNING: pdf file)
http://blaiq.typepad.com/occams_razor/files/the_elongating_tail_of_brand_communication_by_mohammed_iqbal.pdf
And then Iqbal goes ahead and tears Saatchi a new one. (Maybe Saatchi should stick to sponsoring shocking post-Duchampian art exhibits.) The article goes on to refute the premise and proposes that more is better – people want richer content, information and memes that suit them personally, and even branding games that they can participate in. In the distributed word Pajama People are demanding more, not less.
Iqbal writes: “Russell Davies, planner provocateur and ex-world wide planning head of Nike, wrote on his blog (though not directly in response to Lord Saatchi’s speech) : “What people actually want is stuff with some complexity, some meat, some richness. Stuff that has depth, humour, tension, drama etc etc. Not stuff that's distilled to a simple essence or refined to a single compelling truth. No one ever came out of a movie and said "I really liked that. It was really clear." Clarity is important to our research methodologies, not to our consumers.
“Judging by the reaction to this post and by the Mexican wave of blog posts and comments criticizing One Word Equity, it was obvious this idea of brand polyphony (as Russell calls it) was infectious and appealing. It’s appealing because we ourselves as consumers seek it. We find fault in movie-characters for being too uni-dimensional. We say people are uninteresting (or boring) if their range of interests or conversations are too narrow.”
The piece is worth quoting from extensively.
“The fragmentation and abundance of media has now helped lower the barriers to connecting the supply and demand of more brand messages – theoretically of all possible brand messages.
“For eg, Volvo’s primary brand proposition could continue to be safety. But if there’re people out there who relate to it as a stylish car, you can create communication tailor-made for them. Simultaneously, another bunch of people might actually like a Volvo for its European-ness. No longer will they have to ignore that connection and only seek ‘safety’ in Volvos.”
“In a long tail world, the real opportunity is not in pre-filtering what’s available but in making everything available to everybody. And providing the aggregated audience the tools to sort out what’s good from what’s not (like Flickr does for photos with its folksonomy, for eg.)”
“In a long tail brand communication, all possible brand messages are simultaneously available in the market.”
“When you have infinite choice, context is more important than content. For too long advertisers and communicators have focused only on what they are saying and not enough on who they are speaking to and where the conversation is happening. And even when they do so, they have almost always painted the picture with broad and all-encompassing brushstrokes.”
Read the entire essay (WARNING: pdf file)
http://blaiq.typepad.com/occams_razor/files/the_elongating_tail_of_brand_communication_by_mohammed_iqbal.pdf
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
PajamaManufacturing
You are ready for the homeworker revolution. But are you ready for the home manufacturer revolution?
Over the last couple of years, some of us have been hearing about MIT’s FabLab (officially “The Center for Bits and Atoms”). Professor Neil Gershenfeld has been leading a potential revolution in desktop manufacturing (the fab in fabrication). The idea is that a PC could “drive a printer that deposits material in layers to form three-dimensional objects.” For the moment, this is useful primarily for prototypes or mini-manufacturing (manufacturing of object with limited public demand), but let your imagination wander.
The most advanced desktop fabricators are also known as 3-D printers. They cost about $25,000 - $35,000 and they fit comfortably into a home office.They’ve been used for a wide variety of things including architecture and medicine. According to Bruce Sterling, most of them work “by assembling bits of powder and glue or depositing layer upon layer of ceramic, paper, or plastic.”
Now, Cornell University is joining into the 3-D manufacturer-printer world. A home manufacturing free-for-all can’t be to far away.
To quote an article from the “New Science Tech” website, “Some day, Lipson believes, every home will have a ‘fabber,’ a machine that replicates objects from plans supplied by a computer. Such devices could change how we acquire common products, he suggests: Instead of buying an iPod, you would download the plans over the Internet and the fabber would make one for you.
Read entire article.
Over the last couple of years, some of us have been hearing about MIT’s FabLab (officially “The Center for Bits and Atoms”). Professor Neil Gershenfeld has been leading a potential revolution in desktop manufacturing (the fab in fabrication). The idea is that a PC could “drive a printer that deposits material in layers to form three-dimensional objects.” For the moment, this is useful primarily for prototypes or mini-manufacturing (manufacturing of object with limited public demand), but let your imagination wander.
The most advanced desktop fabricators are also known as 3-D printers. They cost about $25,000 - $35,000 and they fit comfortably into a home office.They’ve been used for a wide variety of things including architecture and medicine. According to Bruce Sterling, most of them work “by assembling bits of powder and glue or depositing layer upon layer of ceramic, paper, or plastic.”
Now, Cornell University is joining into the 3-D manufacturer-printer world. A home manufacturing free-for-all can’t be to far away.
To quote an article from the “New Science Tech” website, “Some day, Lipson believes, every home will have a ‘fabber,’ a machine that replicates objects from plans supplied by a computer. Such devices could change how we acquire common products, he suggests: Instead of buying an iPod, you would download the plans over the Internet and the fabber would make one for you.
Read entire article.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
PajamaJournalism
An exciting piece in Wired News today about a project called Assignment Zero, a project that could also be called “PajamaJournalism.” We all know that some of the better bloggers out there have been correcting false news reports and factchecking the mainstream media for the last several years. But Assignment Zero is the first project we know of – with any seriousness of intention -- that tries to organize itself as a sort-of open source, decentralized news service.
And their first area of investigation is right up PajamaNation’s alley:
"We're going to investigate the growth and spread of crowdsourcing, which overlaps with something called peer production. (Yochai Benkler's complete term is "commons-based peer production.") This basically means people making valuable stuff by cooperating online, mainly because they want to and sometimes because they're paid to assist."
Read the entire piece
And their first area of investigation is right up PajamaNation’s alley:
"We're going to investigate the growth and spread of crowdsourcing, which overlaps with something called peer production. (Yochai Benkler's complete term is "commons-based peer production.") This basically means people making valuable stuff by cooperating online, mainly because they want to and sometimes because they're paid to assist."
Read the entire piece
Famous To 15 People
It’s not my intention here to brag, but back in 1989 I published a tribute to Andy Warhol where I predicted that in the digital age, every individual would be a multimedia corporation – an “art factory.” “In the future,” I wrote, “everybody will be famous to fifteen people.” That’s the Long Tail!
This is closely related to the idea behind Pajamanation. But you don’t have to be in media to participate in this sociocultural shift, you just need to have a skill or service to offer and a way to get online regularly.
As Thomas Friedman has written, communications and other technologies have made the world “flat” – it’s put us all into the same space, provided we are able to get online. And it’s increasingly distributed the desktop tools that we need to produce work at the same level as large institutions. For example, the editing power that used to cost a video filmmaker $500,000 now comes in software that can cost as little as $500 or in some cases can be had for free.
Anyway, if you’re here, you probably already know about this paradigm shift. Over the weeks, months and years to come, I will be blogging here about this new world that Pajamanation is here to service. I will post about – and link to – not only materials directly related to micro-entrepreneurialism and the decentralization of work, but the decentralization of all aspects of social relations, whether it involves people getting their entertainment on YouTube or their gourmet foods at a specialty shop instead of sticking with the supermarket.
I will also be exploring the economics and politics of the flat world 10, 20, 30 years out… (all in good time)
For starters, I think you will find this piece on San Francisco’s Neo-Nomads or Cyber-Bedouins a vivid reflection of our PajamaCulture. It is all about people who have turned our local coffee shops into their home offices.
Not that this is terribly new. The San Francisco Chronicle has run this same basic story every three years since 1994. It’s just that the convenience and the ease and the transportable digital power keeps growing exponentially, so more people can nomadize their work activity better.
RU Sirius
This is closely related to the idea behind Pajamanation. But you don’t have to be in media to participate in this sociocultural shift, you just need to have a skill or service to offer and a way to get online regularly.
As Thomas Friedman has written, communications and other technologies have made the world “flat” – it’s put us all into the same space, provided we are able to get online. And it’s increasingly distributed the desktop tools that we need to produce work at the same level as large institutions. For example, the editing power that used to cost a video filmmaker $500,000 now comes in software that can cost as little as $500 or in some cases can be had for free.
Anyway, if you’re here, you probably already know about this paradigm shift. Over the weeks, months and years to come, I will be blogging here about this new world that Pajamanation is here to service. I will post about – and link to – not only materials directly related to micro-entrepreneurialism and the decentralization of work, but the decentralization of all aspects of social relations, whether it involves people getting their entertainment on YouTube or their gourmet foods at a specialty shop instead of sticking with the supermarket.
I will also be exploring the economics and politics of the flat world 10, 20, 30 years out… (all in good time)
For starters, I think you will find this piece on San Francisco’s Neo-Nomads or Cyber-Bedouins a vivid reflection of our PajamaCulture. It is all about people who have turned our local coffee shops into their home offices.
Not that this is terribly new. The San Francisco Chronicle has run this same basic story every three years since 1994. It’s just that the convenience and the ease and the transportable digital power keeps growing exponentially, so more people can nomadize their work activity better.
RU Sirius
Thursday, March 8, 2007
I did not do it!
Sometimes a minute of inattentiveness can change your life forever.
Yesterday, my friend and management team member, the incomparable RU Sirius, America's Cultural Icon, wrote me a mail saying that he had copy-edited our pajamanation website. RU has some subtle manoeuvers in semantic darkness that make a text suddenly seem reaching out to you. He also asked me to pay a small bill on penpal. I had not heard about penpal before, but thought it was probably something San Francisco like, that was the writer's or artist version of paypal. So I logged into the site, accessed and immediately registered. It asked for my name, my day of birth, my year of birth, my month of birth, my address and it went into a new screen. I was expecting it to ask for my credit card when an extraordinary question popped up: have you finished high school or more? As I was just having a telephone conversation on the other end, I just indicated that I had 'more' and then the second question came: what sort of friends are you looking for? I did not really know what to reply, so thinking of Ken I said, 'writers'. Then I was logged in.
Later Ken send me a mail saying, of course, that he meant Paypal. To my amazement I went back to the site I registered in and found myself between teens and preteens from Alabama who exchange extraordinary items of information such as : 'hi I am josh and I have a cat.' Then I saw myself, a white male from Belgium, 50 years old (!) saying 'I am looking for writer penpals' please respond to my address w@pajamanation.com. There was also an automatic mention 'yes I am availalable in a chat room'. Oh my God.
Ken, man, I could go to jail for this. The site is in Texas!!
Yesterday, my friend and management team member, the incomparable RU Sirius, America's Cultural Icon, wrote me a mail saying that he had copy-edited our pajamanation website. RU has some subtle manoeuvers in semantic darkness that make a text suddenly seem reaching out to you. He also asked me to pay a small bill on penpal. I had not heard about penpal before, but thought it was probably something San Francisco like, that was the writer's or artist version of paypal. So I logged into the site, accessed and immediately registered. It asked for my name, my day of birth, my year of birth, my month of birth, my address and it went into a new screen. I was expecting it to ask for my credit card when an extraordinary question popped up: have you finished high school or more? As I was just having a telephone conversation on the other end, I just indicated that I had 'more' and then the second question came: what sort of friends are you looking for? I did not really know what to reply, so thinking of Ken I said, 'writers'. Then I was logged in.
Later Ken send me a mail saying, of course, that he meant Paypal. To my amazement I went back to the site I registered in and found myself between teens and preteens from Alabama who exchange extraordinary items of information such as : 'hi I am josh and I have a cat.' Then I saw myself, a white male from Belgium, 50 years old (!) saying 'I am looking for writer penpals' please respond to my address w@pajamanation.com. There was also an automatic mention 'yes I am availalable in a chat room'. Oh my God.
Ken, man, I could go to jail for this. The site is in Texas!!
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
Me, My skills and I
A few years ago, I made a radical change in my way of thinking. I suddenly realized it had taken my partner 15 years to delete 20 years of education my parents and the system had given me. I am french and under the pretext of being leftish, in favor of a world of solidarity and equality they taught me to play the cards life had given me the best I could. I was allowed sometimes to change the combination of the cards but that was it, never the cards itself.
But what if the cards are not good no matter what the combination is? What if this configuration is just not in harmony with your skills and your need of self-realization? What if you need other cards and you actually even don't know it? And worse, you don't how to get those cards because you have nor the courage nor the knowledge to do so.
Well this is what my partner taught me: you don't like your cards, get others! It is very fashionable to be assertieve, but in reality, the voices of mummies and daddies are hard-wired and sound through walls: be careful don't lose your job... Be careful or you will lose your job... Dont' say that or you will not have the job... Keep your job or you will have no pension!
Well here is the bad news and the good news at once: my generation will not have a pension.
We must try to start our own business, from home, at our ease. We must take care of ourselves, of our lives, of our destiny, we have to try. No more mummies and daddies whispering 'I told you so' every time you have a bad day, or your income is less than expected. All that rebellion and assertiveness was finally worth it but now I need a second step. I need a community. There is no government on earth coming to rescue me. It is up to me, my skills and I.
Sam
But what if the cards are not good no matter what the combination is? What if this configuration is just not in harmony with your skills and your need of self-realization? What if you need other cards and you actually even don't know it? And worse, you don't how to get those cards because you have nor the courage nor the knowledge to do so.
Well this is what my partner taught me: you don't like your cards, get others! It is very fashionable to be assertieve, but in reality, the voices of mummies and daddies are hard-wired and sound through walls: be careful don't lose your job... Be careful or you will lose your job... Dont' say that or you will not have the job... Keep your job or you will have no pension!
Well here is the bad news and the good news at once: my generation will not have a pension.
We must try to start our own business, from home, at our ease. We must take care of ourselves, of our lives, of our destiny, we have to try. No more mummies and daddies whispering 'I told you so' every time you have a bad day, or your income is less than expected. All that rebellion and assertiveness was finally worth it but now I need a second step. I need a community. There is no government on earth coming to rescue me. It is up to me, my skills and I.
Sam
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
A world of labour in terms of cooking
Let’s think of the world of labour in terms of cooking. The hunting society was primarily interested in the ingredients; the farmers invented storage so that the community could preserve food for a “rainy day”; the industrialists made the machines to process food; the managers delivered the cooks but the future will be in the hands of the recipes, not of cooks. The ingredients (raw materials) and the processing will be selected on a global level based on price, performance and quality. The order intake and the fulfillment will be outsourced locally. The recipe however will be glocal: thought of in one place in the form of patent, franchise or format (or any other packaged business knowledge), produced globally and distributed locally. Homeworkers will be recipemakers, cooks, ingredient suppliers and sometimes storage facilitators. They can be one or all in one, depending how they market themselves.
Of course when you read this you will think that this is again neo-liberal bullshit. But let’s call a spade a spade. A micro-entrepreneur is usually a different word for a long term unemployed person. We are talking about entrepreneurs out of necessity. We are living in a knowledge economy. In the west we are told that we need to look to add value to labor. We are told that our competence and skills are a life long process of learning and that this will make our price in the market. But what does it all mean when you lose your job? We think it means that in a knowledge economy, competences become commodities. They can be sold and traded, and that is a new concept. The trading on services because up to now we have been trading on assets all over the world. We are now talking of a derivative of work that needs to be marketed. Somebody makes a translation, somebody else copy edits it, somebody else designs it, somebody else supplies it with pictures, and the last one prints it. That is how you add value. But somewhere in the beginning of the line there may be a salesman who buys the service to be rendered, splits it up and in the end coordinates it again and sells it again. That is trading on services.
Of course when you read this you will think that this is again neo-liberal bullshit. But let’s call a spade a spade. A micro-entrepreneur is usually a different word for a long term unemployed person. We are talking about entrepreneurs out of necessity. We are living in a knowledge economy. In the west we are told that we need to look to add value to labor. We are told that our competence and skills are a life long process of learning and that this will make our price in the market. But what does it all mean when you lose your job? We think it means that in a knowledge economy, competences become commodities. They can be sold and traded, and that is a new concept. The trading on services because up to now we have been trading on assets all over the world. We are now talking of a derivative of work that needs to be marketed. Somebody makes a translation, somebody else copy edits it, somebody else designs it, somebody else supplies it with pictures, and the last one prints it. That is how you add value. But somewhere in the beginning of the line there may be a salesman who buys the service to be rendered, splits it up and in the end coordinates it again and sells it again. That is trading on services.
Monday, January 22, 2007
A market is a place where things are bought and sold.
We must be realistic: unemployment will not go away. Even if our economy now embarks upon the largest growth ever known in its history, jobs will never simply come back. Robotization, informatics and globalisation have been their silent killers. We are faced with an economic paradigm shift and we have to be careful or we disappear between the tectonic plates. We (and our political leaders) must have the courage to disconnect from the fantasy that jobs can be created. We do not need more jobs. For heaven’s sake, the ‘job’ as we know it is exactly the problem. We certainly don’t need more of that. On the contrary, jobs should disappear. The definition of a job as a little boxed entity in which we can find a job description connected to a solid hourly work schedule and a variety of benefits guaranteed through governmental negotiation – such as pension rights, unemployment benefits and health insurance, plus taxes that are recouped both from employer and employee – is no longer useful. The whole job model should be abandoned, because it prevents us from looking forward at a time when there is no time to lose. Without jobs, there will be plenty of work which we will be able to divide over smaller job packages, but the ‘job’ itself must evaporate, because they are holding us down.
Our economy is market-oriented. The market provides a lot of work, but no ‘jobs’: we have invented this concept. A market is a place where things are bought and sold. It’s a space for work without bounds, now providing fulltime and part-time jobs, then temporarily dwindling into unemployment. Sometimes the market place supplies work through freelance contracts or barter, sometimes via consultancy or micro-entrepreneurship. The trend of personalization fits this flexible work scheme, but standardization (standard wages, hours, job descriptions, pension rights, health insurance, unemployment benefits, work place ...) derives from an industrial work model that has long gone.
There is no doubt that kicking the habit of the job concept will be difficult. However, a world without jobs doesn’t necessarily mean a world without work. There is plenty of work, more even than there used to be, but the notion of a job, as it was conceived in the process of the industrial revolution, should be abandoned. We can start our own businesses. We can set up virtual companies (assembled from independent suppliers connected to one another through a joint product, a joint product strategy or a communication medium) or multiple companies at the same time; we can establish ourselves as an artist, we can work as ‘inplacement’ for an existing company; we can set-up our own transactions (real estate, project management ...) as a dealer; we can become consultant in our own area expertise; or we can work as a freelancer or as a part-time worker, all at the same time. We will no longer have ‘one job’ and we should not expect it to be so any longer. The word ‘job’ is only a hundred years old. Before that time, people had ‘work’ and this lasted for thousands of years, without difficulties worthy of mention. It should be possible to return to such a model.
To argue that jobs will return is as nonsensical as to claim that cotton nappies will return to replace diapers or that traditional postal services will replace e-mail services with a vengeance.
Our economy is market-oriented. The market provides a lot of work, but no ‘jobs’: we have invented this concept. A market is a place where things are bought and sold. It’s a space for work without bounds, now providing fulltime and part-time jobs, then temporarily dwindling into unemployment. Sometimes the market place supplies work through freelance contracts or barter, sometimes via consultancy or micro-entrepreneurship. The trend of personalization fits this flexible work scheme, but standardization (standard wages, hours, job descriptions, pension rights, health insurance, unemployment benefits, work place ...) derives from an industrial work model that has long gone.
There is no doubt that kicking the habit of the job concept will be difficult. However, a world without jobs doesn’t necessarily mean a world without work. There is plenty of work, more even than there used to be, but the notion of a job, as it was conceived in the process of the industrial revolution, should be abandoned. We can start our own businesses. We can set up virtual companies (assembled from independent suppliers connected to one another through a joint product, a joint product strategy or a communication medium) or multiple companies at the same time; we can establish ourselves as an artist, we can work as ‘inplacement’ for an existing company; we can set-up our own transactions (real estate, project management ...) as a dealer; we can become consultant in our own area expertise; or we can work as a freelancer or as a part-time worker, all at the same time. We will no longer have ‘one job’ and we should not expect it to be so any longer. The word ‘job’ is only a hundred years old. Before that time, people had ‘work’ and this lasted for thousands of years, without difficulties worthy of mention. It should be possible to return to such a model.
To argue that jobs will return is as nonsensical as to claim that cotton nappies will return to replace diapers or that traditional postal services will replace e-mail services with a vengeance.
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