Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog

Neither users nor investors are particularly interested in being pitched with ‘the Semantic Web’ or ‘RDF’ or ‘triples’; they want applications and solutions. The fact that the Semantic Web is at work behind the scenes to make those applications and solutions ‘better’, cheaper, more scalable or whatever is clearly important, but shouldn’t be the opening gambit in conversation. ^{^}

The killer app in the 1970s was Visicalc.

In the 1980s, it was the hybrid desktop publish-word processor.

In the 1990s, it was the web browser and Windows XP, the first operating system to truly standardize the desktop computing experience and make it stable. These two tamed the Wild West of computing and gave it a standard interface.

For the 00s, and beyond, it’s going to be a data manipulator. This may be the operating system itself, allowing data in portability formats to be shared between applications so that one copy can be updated and all other copies follow. It may be an application like Microsoft Word, that allows you to embed and work with enough formats to hack just about anything into a final form, and then send it to your SharePoint server.

Or it could come from the open source world, where people are readying interesting apps to deal with the new possibilities of XML and RDF.

I can’t wait to see this new killer app. The future is bright with possibility.

Some of the more famous figures in management talked about how industrialized nations transition to a “knowledge economy.” This was believed to be an ongoing process we’d witness over several generations.

I like this definition of knowledge economy:

We define the knowledge economy as production and services based on knowledge-intensive activities that contribute to an accelerated pace of technical and scientific advance, as well as rapid obsolescence. The key component of a knowledge economy is a greater reliance on intellectual capabilities than on physical inputs or natural resources. ^{^}

With the transition to this economy, or rather to the degree of transition to this economy, information technology needs change. Knowledge is organized data; we’re going to need ways to organize our data, experts who signal us through the reams of data and find significant bits, and finally, we’ll need a way to constitute our externalized persona through our information.

Where previous generations of IT were about finding that killer app, our transitional knowledge economy is going to demand data in universal formats that can be manipulated by multiple applications, and possibly, update itself in these many forms with the collaboration of the operating system. People no longer use computers as calculators; soon, they’ll no longer use them as application interfaces.

This new knowledge economy will rely heavily on knowledge workers. …the most striking growth will be in “knowledge technologists:” computer technicians, software designers, analysts in clinical labs, manufacturing technologists, paralegals. …They are not, as a rule, much better paid than traditional skilled workers, but they see themselves as “professionals.” Just as unskilled manual workers in manufacturing were the dominant social and political force in the 20th century, knowledge technologists are likely to become the dominant social—-and perhaps also political—-force over the next decades. ^{^}

As pointed out, people are going to need experts.

These are professionals of an uncredentialed sort, because their most immediate skills are outside of any academic program, since the technologies change too fast. (Later, the industry will recognize how important a solid founding in both technological concepts and humanities including critical thought can be, but that’s a ways off.)

On the UK’s Guardian newspaper site today, writer Jemina Kiss suggested that Web 3.0 will be about recommendation. “If web 2.0 could be summarized as interaction, web 3.0 must be about recommendation and personalization,” she wrote. Using Last.fm and Facebook’s Beacon as an example, Kiss painted a picture of a web where personalized recommendation services can feed us information on new music, new products, and where to eat. It’s a marketers dream and it’s really not far off from the definitions we’ve come up with in the past here on ReadWriteWeb. ^{^}

These experts will manage everything from the mundane to the exotic. They are like the buddy you have who knows all the good restaurants, or the kid on the block everyone goes to with their computer problems.

4. Change the charts: The Charts don’t make much sense anymore. Now that fewer and fewer people are buying music the charts need to reflect the other ways that people are consuming music.

5. Trust the DJ: Online means anyone can access or own John Peel’s entire record collection, but the instant and massive availability of music on demand means you need a trusted guide like John Peel more than ever. The new layers of value will come from the social connections that come about through music as much as from the music itself. ^{^}

These knowledge economians are going to be less interested in rote process, and more interested in both efficiency and marketing. I don’t think, however, that there will actually be a “web economy” distinct from the knowledge economy.

The knowledge worker (the executive in Drucker’s quote) goes after individual productivity; the web worker after group-based, collaborative, wisdom-of-crowds productivity. The knowledge worker cuts out unproductive uses of time; the web worker cuts out redundant information sources. The knowledge worker focuses on time efficiency; the web worker on attention expansion. ^{^}

The web economy is a subset of the knowledge economy. While the web is still new, people are trying to use it as if it were a replacement economy. It’s more consistent to say it is one view of our economy, but that the rules are the same. You need to get customer to product, producer to market, and inform all parties of the advantage of this arrangement. The “web economy” as described above is a type of specialized marketing that operates within the knowledge economy.

Where will IT go in this brave new world?

Ultimately I hope that I can keep my identity, friend list, photographs, videos and everything else that constitutes the (de)Centralized Me at any service provider that I trust (meaning I trust them to protect that data, but never go against my wishes and try to keep it to themselves if that isn’t what I want), and just tell sites like Facebook and everyone else where to grab it. ^{^}

We’re going to need a data-centric world, so that we can produce knowledge (organized data) from the masses of stuff out there. This will be the basic process: filter, arrange, add hierarchy and then, add marketing.

For this to happen, we need a few more things:

• We’re going to need a gadget to browse this data from anywhere. I suggest a hybrid phone, ebook reader and netbook.
• We’re going to need a universal format to stick our data in, so that it can exist in multiple places at once, with multiple permissions like we give to file systems, and the option to update itself automatically in different applications and/or add programmatic functionality to the data itself. XML/RDF will take care of the first part of this, but the operating system is going to have to grow to do the rest.
• We’re going to need a new culture based on the information ecosystem that gives us rights and expectations and customs based around keeping our data, both public and private, where we need it. Old etiquette was based on recognizing the individual and her rights; the new etiquette will be recognizing the rights of individuals to their data.

As part of this, ideas like data portability are going to become mainstream. We want the ability to take our data out of any specific application (like Microsoft Word) or web site (like Facebook) or operating system (like Mac OS) and move it to all others, with no restrictions, because there are going to be some interesting mashups.

Microsoft wasn’t interested in creating some grandiose 1980s’ style computer-aided-software-engineering (CASE) tool; it was thinking more along the lines of providing a class designer. The goal, according to Box: “putting more and more of your application into data and putting less in code.” ^{^}

All of this is part of our long, slow transition into a knowledge economy. Data is now cheap; it’s everywhere, and storage is cheap, too. Processing time is cheap. And we have lots of trained people.

“Then I went online, thinking the net must help me, but I was having to spend a lot of time finding sites. There was no central place that aggregated everything. I thought there really is an opportunity here. Not even Google can tell me where I can buy a red leather sofa.” ^{^}

It’s now a race to produce the perfect design, the perfect meme, the best explanation, and get it to your audience. That’s where the knowledge economy and information technology overlap.

Every age has a script. Our script is that our technology will gradually spread to the whole world, and soon we’ll all be able to talk. Some months ago, people were predicting it would happen:

One of the first changes for Mundie, the chief research and strategy officer, is leading Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential Group, which includes the company’s work for the developing world as well as its philanthropy.

The other real reason to put it in my group is because the other two new businesses I’ve got in my group are health and education and when we look at what the Unlimited Potential needs are, yes one component of it is to allow people to be productive, but almost invariably the other two legs of that stool are health care and education.

We’re right at the point now where all phones will go from dumb to smart. And I think that’s a major focus for us in terms of how we can bring access to the Internet and some of these technologies, particularly around health care, to this rural poor population. That coupled with online services and more sophisticated software. My dream is that we really can get to the point where it really is do-it-yourself medicine and, to a certain extent, do-it-yourself education. I don’t see a way where the world is going to scale up traditional concepts of health and education for another four and a half billion people. ^{^}

That was good thinking. It contrasts the guys who wanted to make a laptop for the poor but then couldn’t figure out a way to keep the project afloat with money, so created a half-commercial half-charity offering that flopped brutally, and in doing so, fell behind on the technology curve and is now inviable.

As for the last key problem, transforming laptops into learning is a non-trivial leap of logic, and one that remains inadequately explained. No, we don’t know that it’ll work, especially not without teachers. And that’s okay — the way to find out whether it works might well be by trying. Sometimes you have to run before you can walk, yeah? But most of us who joined OLPC believed that the educational ideology behind the project is what actually set it apart from similar endeavors in the past. Learning which is open, collaborative, shared, and exploratory — we thought that’s what could make OLPC work. Because people have tried plain laptop learning projects in the past, and as the New York Times noted on its front page not so long ago, they crashed and burned.

Nicholas’ new OLPC is dropping those pesky education goals from the mission and turning itself into a 50-person nonprofit laptop manufacturer, competing with Lenovo, Dell, Apple, Asus, HP and Intel on their home turf, and by using the one strategy we know doesn’t work. But hey, I guess they’ll sell more laptops that way. ^{^}

When you are looking to bring a product into people’s lives, you have to carefully look at what fits into their lives.

Here in the industrialized world, having a laptop makes sense. We can put it on our desks in our air-conditioned rooms and carry it with us in our cars.

In most of the rest of the world, people live without climate control in places where it’s not wise to have property you cannot keep close at hand at all times. Further, they don’t have much money, and they want a multifunction device.

So how are they getting online? Internet cafes — and cell phones, as the Microsofties predicted:

A new study suggests cell phones are now the communication technology of choice worldwide. According to a U.N. report, six in 10 people across the globe now use mobile phones, particularly in developing countries. The International Telecommunication Union says by the end of last year, there were an estimated 4.1 billion subscribers globally. In 2002, there were about 1 billion. And developing countries now account for about two-thirds of cell phones in use. ^{^}

As I’ve predicted in other posts, cell phones, netbooks and etext readers are converging into a new type of gadget. It will be easily portable and cheap like a phone; it will have the wacky touch screen interface of an ebook reader or iphone; it will have the keyboard and light computer function of a netbook, because 90% of people do the same simple tasks 90% of the time, and those barely require the computer technology of the late 1980s.

This is the new revolution. It’s not your latest AJAX-enabled website. The next revolution is the new interface, and the new gadget, that will take the web beyond the personal computer and into the realm of being an appliance like other everyday objects we now take for granted: phones, clocks, toilets and ATMs.

I was one of those darn fools who got an English literature degree. Before that, I was into programming; after that, I was into music. What does each teach?

• Music teaches you to think in abstractions and isomorphic structures;
• Programming teaches you to think of small objects interacting to produce results that don’t look like they come from such small objects.
• Literature, on the other hand, teaches you to view all of reality as metaphor.

When I approach the field I call “information science,” or the study of how things are organized in a practical (non-academic) sense, I like to use the term “information ecosystem.” This means the interaction between small objects to produce a result that is, like music, an isomorphic pattern that appears in different fields and objects. The patterns in which information is organized are the metaphors, and so you see them in many places even though they exist in none.

Kind of neat, isn’t it.

Johnson goes on to draw an analogy between these human waste-recyclers and their microscopic counterparts, bacteria. “Without the bacteria-driven processes of decomposition, the Earth would have been overrun by offal and carcasses eons ago,” he reminds us. “If the bacteria disappeared overnight, all life on the planet would be extinguished within a matter of years.”

Bloggers do similarly useful work. In fact, the blogosphere may best be thought of as a vast digestive tract, breaking down the news of the day into ever finer particles of meaning (and ever more concentrated toxins).

It’s worth remembering that, in a literary context, another word for “parasitic” is “critical”. Blogging is, at its essence, a critical form, a means of recycling other writings to ensure that every molecule of sense, whether real or imagined, is distilled and consumed. ^{^}

At the bottom of the information ecosystem are people who read stuff.

Obliquely above are people like me: we sip from the firehose of news and post the stuff we think is neat, and comment on it.

People then move that around off-line by mentioning it in conversation.

Eventually, someone higher-up may find one of these ideas interesting from me or another small producer, and cite or plagiarize them.

The technical term for the blogosphere as defined above is saprophyte, or a creature that survives by digesting and decomposing material.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the new media revolution; it got taken over by old media. While the Internet is home to a staggering diversity of voices, most people still get their online news from established, old-media players. The Project for Excellence in Journalism has just released a report on the state of the news media in 2008, and it finds that top online news destinations command an even greater percentage of readers than than do the top offline news destinations. ^{^}

But even as the corporate world has begun to embrace the idea of the bazaar as a forum for innovation, software programmers have continued to debate the strengths and weaknesses of peer production.

The open source model has proven to be an extraordinarily powerful way to refine programs that already exist — Linux, for instance, is an elaboration of the venerable Unix operating system, and the open source Firefox browser builds on Netscape’s old Navigator — but it has proven less successful at creating exciting new programs from scratch.

That fact has led some to conclude that peer production is best viewed as a means for refining the old rather than inventing the new; that it’s an optimization model more than an invention model. ^{^}

Further up on the food chain, there’s people who produce software. They aren’t quite to where commercial producers are, but they serve an important role.

Open source is free because the labor is free and someone else already designed a commercial version of the program, so the open source team gets a big boost in product design — free money from corporations, in other terms, even though no money changes hands.

As a result, like an oasis, open source attracts both people who live in parched places (low money) and those who are adventurers and have strayed past the boundaries with which they’re familiar, and are now out of water.

This part of the ecosystem allows ideas to cycle from the corporate sphere back down through the end-users (parched) and power users (adventurers), helping the software evolve.

The technology industry thrives on its ability to sell new products to consumers at an ever-increasing pace, and it has turned many upgrades into painless, one-click operations. But millions of users of nearly every type of Internet service and technology, from Netscape and AOL dial-up to old e-mail systems, still prefer to ignore the pitches and sit still — or at least move ahead at their own pace. ^{^}

This is your end user here. They want their technology to just work for five or seven years, because they use it for limited tasks. In fact, 90% of them do the same things: light web surfing, light email, occasional video and audioconferencing, Microsoft Office-style apps, and maybe running one of a handful of custom apps (recipe organizer, stitchery layout, tshirt overlay designer, genealogy programs).

The end users are numerous and so provide impetus for others to develop better versions of the software or operating systems they use. However, the end user won’t take on these new products — the power users will, and only then will the parched end-users explore them.

Simply put, top executives at most companies fail to recognize the value of IT. It can help a company transform data from its operations, its business partners and its markets into useful competitive information. It can be the source of profitable innovations in the way a company interacts with its customers and suppliers. But there is still a tendency to think of IT as a basic utility, like plumbing or telephone service. ^{^}

That’s because it is a basic utility at this point. Users want to make computers do things that are not related to computers, like create spreadsheets or charts or reports; programmers want to make computers do computer things; management wants to make the two work together to get a cash-producing product out there. Together they form one part of this ecosystem.

According to Levy’s introduction, “the best tech writing is still found where you’d most expect it: top-notch publications that seek out the best writers.” This means that blogging, which tends to focus more on daily commentary and criticism than on deep-dive reporting and traditional features, tends to produce less material that’s interesting to read a year later. ^{^}

There are other special relationships. Tech writers (writers in mainstream publications who talk about technology, as opposed to “technical writers,” who write manuals) are the people who go out and find the big ideas and then bring them back to others; they’re like lions who make a kill, eat their fill, and then leave the carcass for others to pick over and finally decompose, leaving a fresh bed of loam for next season.

The history of online social networking would make for an interesting book. It’s all the rage nowadays as if it were something new, but in fact social networking was already in play everywhere in the early 1980s, when the Web was dominated by the Source, CompuServe, and various homebrew BBS systems. ^{^}

It’s true: humans have always molded technology into the same form, because it’s shaped around the same ecosystem — the human social network that uses technology to achieve its daily tasks.

And here’s an example of one part of the ecosystem that is running through its long life cycle, and possibly facing changes:

I adored the Wikipedia when it was first launched and I contributed to a number of articles, some extensively, and always anonymously. The Wikipedia then was a riot of contributors, each adding bits and pieces to the articles they were familiar with, with nary an admin or editor in sight.

It worked and grew because it tapped into the heretofore unmarshaled energies of the uncredentialed. The thesis procrastinators, the history buffs, the passionate fans of the alternate universes of Garth Nix, Robotech, Half-Life, P.G. Wodehouse, Battlestar Galactica, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charles Dickens, or Ultraman—all those people who hoped that their years of collecting comics or reading novels or staring at TV screens hadn’t been a waste of time—would pour the fruits of their brains into Wikipedia, because Wikipedia added up to something. This wasn’t like writing reviews on Amazon, where you were just one of a million people urging a tiny opinion and a Listmania list onto the world—this was an effort to build something that made sense apart from one’s own opinion, something that helped the whole human cause roll forward.

Wikipedia was the point of convergence for the self-taught and the expensively educated. The cranks had to consort with the mainstreamers and hash it all out—and nobody knew who really knew what he or she was talking about, because everyone’s identity was hidden behind a jokey username. All everyone knew was that the end product had to make legible sense and sound encyclopedic. It had to be a little flat—a little generic—fair-minded—compressed—unpromotional—neutral. The need for the outcome of all edits to fit together as readable, unemotional sentences muted—to some extent—natural antagonisms. ^{^}

If you cross levels of the ecosystem, you get a temporary boost, but then struggle because you are out of context. If there is drought, prairie dwellers may go to the forest, and mice may hunt bugs, but those are unsustainable. The biggest problem on the internet is understanding its ecosystem, and recognizing which parts feed which audience. If you misread, you go through a short life cycle because your model is unsustainable.

Right now, in our information ecosystems, there is barely any knowledge of the different parts and how they interact. We view users as generic customers or receivers of free software. We need to start looking into users not as a solid group, but as a hierarchy of people with different needs and interests, and by finding their part of the ecosystem, pitch them the products they need instead of generic solutions.